OH, almost forgot - Next weekend, we’re having a Labor Day Fish Fry - all the fried catfish you can eat, basically. Can’t wait...
A former Pastor once joked, “If you wake up in the middle of the night craving fried chicken, you know God is calling you to be a Baptist preacher!”
(I’m a bit overweight, but no medical problems - I lose weight when I need to.)
I’m also in S. Tennessee and there are a lot of black Baptist churches around. IMO, there is not much better than a black Baptist church. It’s odd that you will see whites attend a black church but not the other way around. Nobody cares but most of the Baptist churches locally are pretty much self segregated. A black funeral is the same as a black church with a lot of emotion. One of my sisters was married to a black man. He was a captain in the air-force. They had three sons before they divorced. My sister stayed close to his parents until the boys were grown in Atlanta. When the youngest was in college he got really sick and died. The funeral was held in Atlanta and it was a combination of the screaming, crying, wailing black side and the stuffy reserved white side. Her son was only 19 when he passed so I didn’t think anything about it at the time because everybody was upset but later I realized how much more emotional and ‘real’ emotion is with the black relatives. So many of the white churches are very formal and reserved. Both like the Sunday fried chicken tradition though.