Let Your Pastor Know

Mrs. Puff is up the miff tree on a seat fixed and firm,
And she’d like to tell the pastor A few things to make him squirm!
Mrs. Puff was sick abed, sir; Yes sir, sick a bed a week;
And the pastor didn’t call sir, never even took a peek!
Wasn’t that enough, sir, to provoke a saint to wrath,
And to make a Christian pilgrim wander from the churchly path?
When I asked her if the doctor called to see her, she said, “sure.”
And she looked as if she thought I needed some good, strong, mind cure.
Then I asked how the doctor knew that sickness laid her low. 
And she said that she had called him On the phone and told him so. 
So the doctor called to see her, and the pastor didn’t go, 
For the doctor knew that she was ill But the pastor didn’t know.
Now the doctor got his bill paid with a nicely written check, 
But the pastor - for not knowing, Simply “Got it in the neck!”

From The Baptist Challenge, June 1993 (as reprinted in The Baptist Waymark, Vol. III, No. 2, March-April 1995, p. 3)