Sunday

I find myself sitting in a coffee shop on a rainy day in Truckee with a warm cup of Chai and my thoughts to keep me company. There’s nowhere I am headed, nowhere I am needed, no schedule to this day. I went to church this morning for the first time in a long while. I felt a little awkward being in a fellowship group with many strangers all praising the same God in different ways. The music was way too loud and more of a performance than what I would prefer at a church fellowship but I sang anyway… I tried to let the words speak to me rather than me simply speak the words. It’s hard; it really is hard for me to enter into a state of worship in such an environment. I don’t feel drawn to sing from my heart when I feel like I am competing with the music and melodies.

 

There is something beautifully sweet about worship where the voices of the congregation form the melodies and the harmonies. Where you can hear the old lady singing next to you with a tone of a voice that has lived many years walking with God and has known hurt, sorrow, deep joy, selfless love and laughter; where you can hear the eagerness in the voice of a new believer sitting behind you wanting desperately to understand and feel the depth of the words she is singing and knowing as time goes on she will; where you can hear the middle aged man a few seats over singing unreservedly, slightly off key and off melody without a care in the world as he has grown to know true freedom as a child of God and who is comfortable with the man God has made him to be; and where you can feel the deep bass of the pastors voice resonate in your chest as you can hear him wrestling with the words of the old hymns admitting to himself that he still doesn’t have it all figured out and that it is ok. This I believe is where the true beauty of worship occurs, in the voices and hearts of the people as they come together in a state of vulnerability and hear one another’s real life struggles, questions, joys and fears as they speak to one another and to God through song. Together their voices call out to the heavens and ask to be filled with the spirit of grace to love one another, help one another and extend love and forgiveness where it is the hardest to so.

 

As the pastor stands to speak to the people he is empowered by the attention of the congregation to speak as one called by God to share his passion and desire to live a life rooted in the scriptures God wrote to us and to call others to do the same. Here he comes humbly before God’s people and through his own vulnerability he invites others into his thoughts, revelations and questions he himself wrestles with about the scriptures. He allows himself to admit when he is wrong and when he doesn’t know the answer to the questions he asks, however he will not settle for an easy conclusion; he will not leave the people with an answer or solution he himself does not believe. He dares to leave the people asking rather than concluding; he dares to allow his message to be left unsettled in order to cause his family to seek God for the truth that He wants to communicate through His word and the work of the spirit in their lives through real experiences. He himself is willing to bear the weight of sacrifice to carry the burdens of others in order that the smallest bit of change and growth might occur in just one life.

 

This is where it gets messy and where we enter into relationship with others to such a depth that we must be affected in the process if it is to be real relationship and if we are to really experience what Jesus meant when he said to “love one another as I have loved you.” This is where we give up our ‘rights’ to our own life and allow others to have a claim on it in the context of community. It’s not always meant to be fair or enjoyable but it will always be real and rich and we will always come to know God deeper when we do enter into this state of relationship. Being the leader of a church body is a very costly life to live; where one willingly lives his life and puts his family’s life under close examination and scrutiny by the people in a community. This to me is a real example of what it means to live one’s life humbly in community, to allow oneself and one’s family to be lived as an example to a larger body of people who can learn from your successes and your failures.

 

The church really is a funny thing as I think about it. How the very things we struggle with the most (our insecurities, fears, judgments, hurts, questions etc…) form the very basis of what the depth of the church is meant to be. A place where we can come with these things and seek to live a life in deeper relationship with God and each other in the midst of all these things, yet it’s these things that often prevent us from doing so.  It is an ironic mystery, the church, but at the same time I find it a beautifully challenging stage that we enter into and really learn what this thing called relationship is supposed to look like and feel like. I want to learn what real relationship feels like and I want to be that girl in her mid-twenties who can stand in church next to that old lady and in front of that new believer and sing with a tone that really reveals her desire to be known and to be affected by others in community in a raw and real way without concern for her own comfort or security. Lord, may we learn to truly sing together!