Winsomewit.com is dedicated to a little understood and rarely mentioned genre of writing known as "Christian satire". I started this site about six or seven years ago in hopes of inspiring others to try their hands at it. Since then, the site has been listed in various locations of the web and in print as a market for Christian humor. Most of the submissions have been funny, but not in a way their authors intended.

I've redesigned winsomewit. I've toned down some of my grander designs and hopes of world domination. My hope is to continue this as an encouragement to others who share my quixotic quest. I will still gladly publish anything that comes to me that fits my broad definition of Christian satire. Mostly this will now be the admitted dumping ground/repository of my published and unpublished columns.

Christian satire is a way of conveying truth from a Christian perspective in an indirect, "oblique" way. Thus this column is so named. However, in my attempts to write op/ed pieces for newspapers I sometimes veer a bit off my own mark. Below is a recent column that appeared in the Mille Lacs Messenger.

As my family and I settled in for a Sunday morning worship service I was attacked. The impact came from behind me and struck me right where my collar and hairline meet. I quickly realized that an insect of some kind had landed. Whatever it was, it was slowly climbing upward toward the top of my head.

Two urges collided in my brain. The one urge was to panic, jump up, and do the frantic white-man dance. The other was the primeval fear of drawing attention to myself in the middle of a church service. Fortunately, the latter instinct conquered the first. Instead of panicking, I waited as the bug meandered to the crown of my head. With a quick swatting motion I ducked my head and knocked the little critter onto the floor. Dazed for a moment it managed to finally crawl under the seat of a fellow worshipper.

I was relieved to be rid of the little assassin, but I knew that I had merely transferred my misfortune to my neighbor. The Golden Rule doesn’t leave much wiggle room on the matter, especially in church, so that meant I had to do something.

Several options presented themselves. If I hadn’t been at church I would have just yelled to the guy and told him that there was a hornet under his chair. But, the service had started, and we were fully locked into sanctified mode.

I could have gotten an usher. Ushers are like the police officers of the church—the go-to-guys. They’re the ones you call when you have “issues.” However, that course of inaction would have left plenty of time for the little commando to crawl up the guy’s leg and commence drilling.

Given that this was church another possibility was obvious. I could have tried to throw together an ad hoc committee. Churches love committees. We could have formed the “Hornet Riddance” task force, appointed a chairman, held meetings for the next six months and eventually put forward an action plan. The congregation could have then voted on our recommendations at the annual business meeting in January.

One option was to let things play themselves out. After all, I didn’t know this hornet personally. He may have been a very passive sort—a real peacenik. Regardless of my personal history with such creatures or their well-known reputation, this one might have been a true Christian. He might have spared the man and his children who sat next to him.

So what if the little bugger had started stinging! It’s not like that would have been the end of the world or even the church. As Ray Stevens sang in his famous “Mississippi Squirrel” it could have become a fight for survival and break out in revival. No one would fall asleep. No one would ever forget it, and when all else failed, they could always blame the pastor.

Instead I did the most obvious. Attracting as little attention to myself as possible, I stood up just enough to get my leg under the man’s chair and thus stomp the life out of the blighter. Evangelical churches in Minnesota tend to attract very few members of PETA, so no one shouted me down for cruelty to animals. Indeed, I don’t think any one even noticed, except my wife who probably assumed that my leg had fallen asleep.

Sometimes when confronted with evil, the best solutions are the least complicated. When a dangerous creature enters our environment, we should grasp the freedom to take action. Committees, police officers, and analysis are for after-the-fact second guessing. Each of us has a right to self-defense. Each of us has a duty to our neighbor to carry with us a proverbial shoe. We need to put our foot down.




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