There used to be big barns here. When I was in high school, a little over 25 years ago, I drove down my street to 50 Highway and turned to go the last 4 miles into town. We used to be "out in the country". Near here was all farms and cropland for as far as you could see.
On the way into town, and come to think of it, on my street, were these huge barns. We're talking 4 story high monstrosities, grand old monarchs of the golden age of agriculture. Big wooden structures with enormous doors on either end. I remember driving by one that was open one day and looking inside and seeing two combines side by side in the middle lane. That's only about a third or a quarter of the width of the building, and they were side by side. The barn was BIG.
As the 90s progressed, I still noted and admired the barns on my drive into town. You could tell they weren't being used any more, but they were still majestic icons of a bygone era. There was something permanent and comforting about them. They linked you to a simpler past.
My favorite one grew more obscure each year as a grove of small trees grew up around it.
Progress marched our way, and the cursed developers kept gobbling up the farmland to fill with their big box stores and car dealerships. Then the barns were torn down. I don't remember the exact day, or if they were knocked down suddenly or slowly. I remember I had been thinking that the biggest barn could be made into a clubhouse for the housing development that was sprouting up behind it, but that didn't happen. It was simply destroyed. And it wasn't destroyed so that something else could be immediately built in it's place. It was simply discarded as if it had been a blight on the landscape instead of a welcome beacon. The grove of trees is still there, taller now, and the small pile of rubble that remains is probably still in there as well.
Next to the grove of trees marking the big barn's final resting place is a new church. If you got a quaint Little House on the Prairie vision of a little white church with a cute steeple, forget it. This thing can probably hold a couple of thousand people. It looks like a spaceship landed in a field and is waiting to take over the city after it gets instructions from the mothership. Next to it, another enormous big box church went in, and next to it, I just noticed that the enormous building being constructed right now is another giant church. How many people are going to be going to these churches? It used to be that people went to church for a sense of community and connection. How much connection can a person feel in a crowd 4 times bigger than your high school graduating class?
There's something sterile and sinister about the big box churches. Just like there's something soulless and impersonal about the big box stores, these new churches feel like a commercial endeavor, fuel by tax increment financing. I wonder if they told the city council that they would bring lots of revenue to the city in exchange for locating here? Really, will they be filled on day one? Are people in this country really that busy out there shopping for a church? Is one's piety now measured in the size and grandure of the church you attend, rather than how good you are to your fellow man? Can people not connect with God unless it's in a really nice, new church? I suppose God doesn't want to waste his time in tiny dingy run down churches. Those people probably aren't even going to be saved. I guess when the Rapture comes, all the big box churches will be empty and nothing else will be touched.
That's why they call it Rapture. It'll be good for those of us that are left.
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