I Put Away Childish Things
Work, for the night is coming;
Work through the morning hours;
Work while the dew is sparkling;
Work 'mid springing flowers;
Work while the day grows brighter,
Under the glowing sun;
Work for the night is coming,
When man's work is done.
It was Reverend Theo. M’s favorite hymn, I believe. Either that or A Mighty Fortress, or Glorious Thing Of Thee Are Spoken which, alas, had the same melody as Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles so we’d have to tone that one down a bit in our Midwestern German Lutheran church just 9 years after World War II.
There were no problems with the melody of the hymn celebrating the Protestant work ethic. Rev. Theo. M. would erupt like a volcano on each of the lines that began with the admonition “Work!” His gigantic belly, way too big for a man who drank no beer, would quiver and pulse as he psyched himself to bellow out the beginning of the next line...
"WORK!"
In the congregation, we would watch and listen with peculiar fascination. Some of us, I confess that for a while I was one, would enthusiastically mimic his sforzando burst, others would simply pretend to ignore it.
One time (one time of many) Rev. Theo. M. came over to our house on a late Sunday afternoon visit. These were social visits and his wife was one of those beautifully ethereal spiritual Lutheran women who liked to giggle about the silly things kids cared about. But my focus was on Rev. Theo. M. As he sat in our parlor, expostulating as a man of Christ, sitting on a folding card table chair, I developed a peculiar fascination with his ample gut. I was a child to be seen and not heard, so I drifted into the realm of fantasy as he spoke authoritatively on adult matters, occasionally stopping to adjust his squawking hearing aid that compensated for an unfortunate collision with a snowball when he was a young boy, not unlike myself, so he told us uncountable times.
Thou shalt not throw snowballs.
To me, his gut was one of the 7 wonders of the world. There were not that many fat people in our country town. As his verbal dissertation droned on, I thought about being outside and playing basketball, but I’d still drift back to that massive gut. Then I had, God forbid, an evil thought – I wondered if he had a twenty-foot penis that he kept coiled up like a snake in a basket - or that green garden hose on the ground in our back yard. That would certainly explain the lower abdominal excess.
Last time I saw Rev. Theo. M. was at the Findlay Hospital. He was there, a couple of years after retiring from the ministry, for unspecified (to me, at least) medical problems. Having learned my Sunday School lessons well – “I was sick, and you visited me” – I dropped over to visit him because he was sick. He politely tolerated my presence in the company of family and I sat there quietly as they spoke of adult things. I was 21. When all the adult matters had been settled, he turned to me and asked me how I was. It was 1965. I told him I had just been drafted. “Good!” he said, “The Army will make a man of you.”
For me, undergoing a spiritual crisis in becoming, against my will, a trained killer after years of being instructed “Thou Shalt Not Kill!” it was a formative moment. It had always been our church secret that “Theo.” did not abbreviate “Theodore” but rather the more obscure “Theophilus.” It means “God-loving,” an explanation given to us as many times as the snowball story. Later, when I became a lab technician in the Army, that “-philus” suffix came to represent the favored habitats of bacteria. The Army had succeeded in making a man of me.
3:42:24 AM 
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Mmmmmm...
The 