Back in the Pew {it happened on a sunday} Day 13

It was May.  I was newly engaged, recently unemployed and living with my parents, and fresh off a highly anticipated trip to Europe with my mom.  For the first time in our relationship, Chris and I were living in the same city, seeing each other every day, and planning for the next fifty years of our lives.

My attention was focused on finding a job, an apartment, and establishing myself.  Chris wanted us to go to church together.

When I was young, still in elementary school, I remember having a conversation with my dad about prayer.  He told me that I could start praying that very day for something big in the future, like the person I would marry.  If I prayed for him, God would look out for him and guide him to me over the coming years.  Since I actually didn't want to get married at all, I tried to think of how I could "trick" God into not sending any boys my way.  I finally came up with the solution.  As a teenager, I heard girls at church say they wanted to marry someone who was a "better" Christian than they were.  Meaning, someone who would influence them to be better people, to read their Bibles faithfully and raise good Christian children.  I thought it sounded like a terrible idea.  Marry someone who was better than me?  Why, so he could remind me all the time how I had fallen short of his glorious standard?  No thanks.

Instead, I began to pray for a man who would be a different kind of Christian than I was.  Haha, yes!  As everyone knew, there was only one kind of Christian, and so I could happily pursue my dreams and just shrug and say, "I guess God couldn't find the right guy for me!  Excuse me while I move to France and do whatever I feel like doing!"  But God is not only exceedingly wise, God has a sense of humor.  How else do you explain the boy that I had a crush on randomly showing me his new Bible one night, then becoming my first serious boyfriend and spending the next four years arguing with me and challenging every belief I had?  I had asked for someone different, and God provided.

And now, when I just wanted to go forward in life with Chris, he was insisting that God should be part of it too.  I told him fine, we could go to church.  I'd attended a few services with him when he lived in Cincinnati and been bored the whole time, so I said he had to find some place on his own, and if he found a church he liked, I would go and see what I thought too.  He spent a few weeks visiting different places in the area, and decided on one he liked.  He attended for a few weeks, met some people our age, and finally I had to make good on my promise and show up.

I walked into the church, a big one with over 2,000 members, and I was determined not to like it.  From the "sancti-nasium" to the weird offering pouches they passed around during service to the weekly Communion (I mean, who takes Communion every week?  We took it once a quarter in the churches I grew up attending, just like the Bible said to do.), everything about this church felt wrong. Until the pastor stood up and began to speak.  Now, I'd sat through hundreds of sermons in my life already, heard ministers and missionaries and traveling evangelists preach, and I'd gotten pretty good at tuning out, keeping myself entertained by counting ceiling tiles or bricks around the baptistry.  Ask me how many ceiling fans or hanging lamps were in any church I attended as a child, I can still tell you the answer.

But this morning was different.  I actually listened to what the man said.  I could follow his message, and it meant something to me.  It was such a meaningful message, in fact, that I began to cry right there in my folding chair.  I was embarrassed, but I couldn't stop myself.  It was like something had broken, something that had been holding it all in, my anger at God, my disappointment in Him, my feelings of emptiness and confusion, and it all tumbled out in the form of tears.  I agreed to come back to the church the following Sunday, and it happened again.  It continued to happen for several months, sometimes during the music, sometimes during the message.  We'd started meeting people, making friends, and I was always trying to avoid sitting with them during the service because I didn't want anyone to know that I came to church to cry each week.

I've learned not to hide my tears, not to feel ashamed of my emotions at church.  I believe that God meets us where we are, that when we make the time to approach Him, to turn our attention His way, He is there, ready and willing to commune with us.  Something had been missing from my life, and not just in the years since I'd stopped attending church.  I had never truly experienced the presence of God, or felt that He looked at me with anything other than judgment.  I was beginning to realize that I had gotten so much wrong.