The world never ceases to amaze me! I just finished writing an article for our church bulletin. This may or may not seem all that amazing on the surface, but stop and think about it for a second. The church I go to is mostly well paid, main stream, white collar, right wing kind of folks. They don’t know me very well (I recently moved back to Michigan), and they tell me I look differently than they do. Yet they seem to love me, and even let me write things for them to read! How cool is that?! As I have told you before, they are being very supportive of us opening a Christian Tattoo shop. Now, what I didn’t tell you, because it hadn’t happened yet, is how my mother-in-law took the news…

We went to see her just the other day. She is an 88 year old wonderful Christian woman. She dresses impeccably, and her condo could easily be mistaken for a Hallmark store. Being 88 however, she is not what you would call a flaming liberal. Now because we will be using our cell phone as the number for the tattoo shop, I am going to have to change my greeting from “Hey, you’ve reached Pete and Rudi”, to “Hey, you’ve reached Sacred Ink Tattoos, where body art has a soul!”. This being the case we figured it would be a good idea to give my mother-in-law a heads up before she called again. It just isn’t a good idea to ‘spring’ things on 88 year olds. So we went over with lunch, and prepared for the worst. I waited until she had finished her bean with ham soup, then chose my words carefully (I also checked to make sure we had a clear path to an exit…. You know, just in case).

“Well Muzz (we call her ‘Muzz’), you know I’ve been struggling with ministry, bla, bla, bla. The church wants to reach some different people, bla, bla, bla. God loves everyone, bla, bla, bla. We are opening a tattoo shop.” There, I had said it. Now I waited. I am pretty sure that the birds stopped chirping for just a split second. At the point where I actually said the word ‘tattoo’, her eyes did the most amazing thing. They grew to about the size of hubcaps off a 67 Chevy. Then just as quickly, they shrank back to normal size. Well, actually a little smaller than normal because she was kind of squinting at me now. I became a little worried that I was about to be using the soup as a new fashion accessory, but that was not to be the case. “Well, what do you think?” I said with the best innocent little preacher voice I could find. To her credit she said that she would have to think about this for a little bit. Some thing require more thought than others. Later, when I told her that I was going to be the tattoo artist, she made somewhat of the same face, only a little less pronounced this time. “Well” she said, “I guess you have to give it a try. You’ll never know unless you try”. I was amazed actually. Now mind you between the lines, and in the tone of her voice there was another message entirely! However, I thought it best to simply look at the words themselves. Much safer that way, don’t you think?

Now my parents simply think it is yet another stupid idea in a long line of stupid ideas. But then again, they thought it was a stupid idea to stop swimming in Jack Daniels and go to church, so ‘stupid’ is a relative term. Pardon the pun.

So all in all I guess things are going pretty good on the road to Sacred Ink. We have found a shop location (more on that to come), our church is standing behind us, our families haven’t disowned us yet, and we are putting together what promises to be one cool shop!!!! Just about everyone who hears about what we are doing seems to think it’s a good idea. So we are hopeful that once the doors are open, we will be busy… yea! Till then, we will keep working to get it open, and we will keep wondering at the strange places God chooses to send us blessings through.

Till next time… Peace!

Pete