How Sunday School almost ruined my life

Both of my parents had their childhoods shattered by the WWII. War often makes people find religion, and my parents were no exception. By the time they hooked up and had me, and washed ashore at Pier 21 in 1956, they were still people of faith. Therefore, church on Sunday was a regular thing growing up. The actual church would shift from time to time. There was a Baptist church at the corner of York Road and Victoria, where we were regulars when I was still small enough to stand on the pew between my parents. Then we suddenly moved churches. Found out years later it was because the leader of that particular flock had been busted in a bath-house raid in Toronto. We tried out a couple of other flocks and eventually landed at the Bethel Baptist Church in Fergus. By then I wasn’t standing on the pew anymore. I’d get shuffled off to the Sunday School section after the opening hymns and general announcements. “Please don’t forget to congratulate Mr. and Mrs. Bervie on their 50th wedding anniversary. We will be having cake and refreshments downstairs after the service” sort of stuff, and that was the signal for the youngsters to vamoose to the Sunday School classrooms. The classrooms were segregated by gender, of which their were only two at the time, so obviously, I’d get the boys class. Every week we’d get a Sunday School paper, and every week there was a feature story that always followed the same template. The protagonist was inevitably a young man (pretty sure the girls’ classes didn’t get the same paper) who fell into a life of sin. He soon found himself taking drugs and drinking alcohol and having promiscuous sex with skanky women to whom he was not wedded in holy matrimony. Sometimes the protagonist even joined a gang! Then, week after week, the protagonist would have his “Jesus” moment. He hit bottom, realized the error of his sinful ways, accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and became a boring dweeb just like me! How ironic! Every Sunday I resolved to be that guy, before he found Jesus! He obviously had way more fun than I did! I have no idea why he’d want to be me, but I for sure knew why I wanted to be him! Booze! Drugs! Gangs! Skanky women! It’s those Sunday School papers that inspired in me an ambition to become a great sinner! Alas, I never made it much beyond occasional drunkenness.