So this morning, on the way to work, I channel-flipped a bit on the radio before I found some manner of Christian station. When I landed there, I heard a great recording of a service: black preacher half-speaking, half-singing the Word for the day, with an organ and drums playing in the background punctuating everything he said.
But the dude was talking about biscuits.
Now, I had to listen for a while to be sure it wasn't some kind of a parody of a gospel service. The dude was seriously talking about biscuits and gravy and how he eats them. He got REALLY specific, too, singing soulfully and categorically about "breaking it up into four to six pieces" and sopping it around on the plate of gravy, and how the parts on the outside sopped up gravy better than those on the inside. He was seriously on the topic of exactly how to eat a biscuit for about five solid minutes without any deviation in topic, citing that there must be southerners in the audience trying to be all refined and pretend they didn't know, like he did, EXACTLY how a biscuit is properly eaten with gravy. At this point, despite it being the hairy asscrack of dawn and my mood being foul, I found myself cracking up, waving my free hand around at every organ sting and saying, "Preach on, chef!"
FINALLY, as I was at my freeway exit, he tied it all together in a way that made absolutely perfect sense: for about 30 seconds, the preacher enumerated what you "sop up": you "sop up" the light, the spirit, the power, the glory, God's destiny (what?), the grace and other such things, where you, like a biscuit absorbing gravy, take on the color of what you are sopping up. You are filled with holy gravy as long as you let God break you down into many pieces to increase your surface area and absorbency. Apparently, God can't fill you with light and energy and the Word if you're an intact human being. It is clearly necessary to "break you down" into smaller, more manageable chunks of person, so that you can better "sop up" the Holy Spirit.
What?
