These are the people in your neighbourhood...

So I'm leaving Break Forth on Friday night an I have an odd encounter.  

For those of you who are pagans and don't know, Break Forth is a giant Christian conference in Edmonton. Definitely the largest in Canada, one of the largest in North America, this thing is fifteen thousand evangelicals jammed into downtown. You can smell the Christians a mile away.  I went for the first time this year, because... I don't know... Who cares. I went.

So as I left on Friday night and was walking to another venue to see the Christian Comedian Juggler, or the Christian Juggling Comedian, or whatever it was, I see a young, ernest looking guy waiting for me at the next corner. I can tell he's waiting for me because he's looking right at me, and he is excited about talking to a stranger. 

Given the context; leaving Canada's largest Christian conference, this person being a clean cut white kid excited to talk to strangers; my assumption that this young fella was a capital "E" Evangelical was not crazy. It was perfectly reasonable for me to mentally prepare myself for this stranger to share with me the exciting things that God was doing in his life and how the Holy Spirit was really speaking to him this weekend. I've had those conversations before. As I walked towards him I was rehearsing my lines: "Yes, I know Jesus. Yeah the worship was awesome... Really powerful... Totally... Cool, I'll be praying for you... Well, I gotta stop at this ATM, blessings man!" (For my non-christian friends, repetition of those phrases in some sort of order can get you through almost all evangelical encounters. That one was free) I know how to navigate this kind of conversation. This ain't my first rodeo.  

As I got closer though, I noticed he was carrying a can of spray whip cream. As the inescapable tractor beam that was this conversation drew me in, this was a wrinkle that didn't fit...

(To be Continued...)