I barely made it to Curves on Friday, I thought, since they close at noon, and I didn’t get there until 11:32 AM, but apparently the noon thing is a guideline, at this Curves, and not a hard and fast rule. It must be nice to have a hobby business, and love your job that much.

At any rate, I didn’t feel well, and I was so concerned about staying upright, because I was congested and sinussy, that it was 2/3 of the way through my workout before I realized that they were playing the Christian workout music I’d read about on a chat board. Now, I believe that people should have the right to listen to whatever they want, but I have to admit that if I’d been feeling at all normal, I’d have requested different music, and, because these women are all pretty nice, they wouldn’t have cared, and everyone would have been happy.

But I wasn’t feeling well, and so I finished my workout, while listening to this pumped-up praise with a combined reaction of being amused and being appalled.

The song that amused me most has a lyric that goes “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” and as I was doing my last set on the abductor/adductor machine, I was seeing these images in my head of a Jesus-figure doing a Windex commercial. “For cleanliness that is truly divine…”

The song that appalled me most was their treatment of “Amazing Grace,” a song that I really love, and that has personal importance to me. I goggled at the radio, and reflected that this is why I don’t like Christian pop and Christian rock. It’s not the message of the music I have the largest issue with, it’s that setting Amazing Grace to a dance beat ruins the impact of the song, turns it into just another catchy tune, with no deep spirituality at all. (Incidentally, I feel the same way about cursing. When you use words like “fuck” in normal conversation, you diminish the power of strong language. You eliminate the shock value.)

Still, I finished my workout laughing, because, really, you haven’t lived til you’ve had the experience of doing crunches to the tune of “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” done in 11/4 time with a disco beat.