Feb. 13, 1995
As a newly formed small group of our church we realized that although we had all attended there for years, we did not know each other. “For years my family has taken a pew on the right side of the church in the middle. Last week someone stopped me and asked if I was new. I told them I had been attending this church all my life.”
That s why we don t know each other. We are creatures of habit. My family always sits on the left.”
“Only the pastor and choir see everyone’s faces regularly. They know where we always sit in the church. If someone is missing, they notice. When my mother was sick, the pastor asked where she was.”
“You know what would really shake him up?” the group leader laughed, “if we had a pew changing day. All we would have to do is move away from where we usually sit and he wouldn’t be able to find anyone.” We laughed, plotted such a day and discarded the idea. Not because the pastor would not see us, but some late-arriving, uninformed parishioners might be miffed to find “their pew” occupied by a total stranger from those foreign parts of the church.
People do not like to have someone else in their place. I found that out the hard way when I was a freshman riding a school bus. Although the bus driver never assigned seats, we all sat the same place every day.
One day, as I walked to my seat five rows from the front on the left side, I stopped and asked, “Do I have to sit here?”
The bus driver shook his head. “Good. I am sitting in the back today,” I declared. As one of the first on the bus, I had my choice of seats.
I chose the wrong one.
The senior, who usually sat in that seat, did NOT like my choice. “Get out of my seat,”
“There are no assigned seats,” I gulped.
“It’s my seat. Move.”
The bus was dead silent. I was too scared to move.
About the time her fist curled up, the bus driver, looking in his overhead mirror said, “Sit down.”
She sat, beside me, but I made sure I never sat beside her again.
In college, some professors noted where students usually sat and made seating charts. Co-eds who moved across the room to get away from a former friend were marked absent.
In my biology class of four students, the professor did not need a seating chart, we huddled together in desks by the front door. Mid- semester we all arrived early one day, looked around our huge classroom and decided to sit in the back across the room by the windows.
When the professor came in, stopped, and asked, “Is there something wrong?”
“No, we just decided to sit someplace else.”
He stood at the front of the class looking over rows and rows of desks at his four students way in the back. He walked to the middle of the classroom and sat on a desk. The board was too far away.
“So why don’t you move up closer to the front?”
He was not comfortable. We were not comfortable. We moved up and the lecture began.
I think the lecture that day was something about animal habits.