Sometimes I Write

I’ve mentioned to several friends that I’m tired of visiting churches. We have spent our summer moving, traveling, and visiting area churches and I’m tired. 🙂 I’m ready to settle down for a bit and find my niche – or create one for myself! We have enjoyed repeated visits to two different churches in the metro area, and though we’ve met great people at both of them, we don’t feel a strong pull to either of them. Shouldn’t we have that feeling of “Oh that is so the place for me!”? We like the people o.k., but don’t feel like those are the places for our family this year. We’ve also visited two churches where nobody talked to us. (yes-really!)

Of the first two mentioned churches, one has a great children’s program, while we like the worship style better at the other one. Our DB friends and team attend one of them, and at the other one, the women have made an effort to get to know me – even inviting me to attend Women of Faith with them. I could be happy at either one, but it’s not about me. Benny NEEDS to be in a place where he can be fed, and really be a part of things without being in charge of the program. Everywhere we’ve lived, whether a paid y.m. position or not, we have ended up in leadership positions. That’s not a bad thing, we just need a year off from that role…a sabbatical if you will. Our philosophy of ministry has been through a major overhaul in the past few years and we believe we are being called to be different. Different seems to be attracted to us, and Different is where we keep finding ourselves.

Benny and I have had words over this situation of church visiting, but I think he’s right. (Yes honey – I know you’re right! ;)) In my frustration I told him I could make friends anywhere and he replied that he can’t. (My thought? Yeah right!) So I asked him what he’s looking for. He said he’ll know when he finds it. He says he’s looking for something more, more than coming and putting your time in and heading to Luby’s (he’s a Texan – never heard of Luby’s ‘until I married him). More than the arguing over the same old, tired issues of the denomination we grew up in. More than the surface relationships you so often find at church, but nobody tries to get to know the real you. More than worrying about how you look and what you’re going to wear, and whether or not it will upset anyone. He wants relationships. He wants to find a place for his heart to rest, and his spirit to be moved. He wants to be relevant to an emerging generation – one that doesn’t fake it because they don’t feel they need to or have to. This was my paraphrase ofcourse.

So Saturday night I asked him where we were going to church in the morning. He said, “I don’t know yet” and disappeared into the office/guest room. A few minutes later he called me in and showed me a website he had found about a church fairly close to us. He thought it sounded cool and we should check it out. I begrudgingly said o.k. I have no idea why I had such a bad attitude, but I did. So Sunday morning arrives and we have a pretty relaxing time getting our day started since church didn’t start until 10:30 a.m. My bad attitude did not disappear while I slept. I started hinting that I didn’t want to go. Not intentionally, but passive-aggressively, I was trying to badger him into going with one of the churches we had already been to – you know -where we actually knew somebody. Long story short – he won, and I felt bad for fighting him on it.

We arrived at The Journey about 10 minutes early. It meets at the Front Range Community College, and we had never been in there. Thankfully there were signs pointing us in the right direction, but we didn’t need them. We barely made it in the door when we were greeted – by a teenager. 🙂 We walked into the room and immediately relaxed a little. (My more conservative friends need to skip the rest of this paragraph so you’re not offended.) There were candles lit around the room. I’m not talking little candles on a table, but big candelabra with pillar candles perched on their arms, and cloth draped around their legs to catch the melting wax. Right inside the door was a table with coffee, tea, juice, and snacks. There were several tables around the outside walls and we went over to check them out. One was a table to sit and write encouraging notes to others, one was to journal, one was being used by a guy painting a picture – which he did throughout the entire service. There was a table on each side of the room set up for communion, which we were invited to go over and take during the singing part of the worship. We met one of the three ministers before the service began. He was very friendly and asked a lot of questions and answered ours. The worship band began to play softly and invite us into our time of worship. I sang along on the songs I knew, like Chris Tomlin’s “Great is our God” and Third Day’s, “You are Holy”. There were many songs I didn’t know, but they were beautiful and something deep within me stirred. Music has always been one of the greatest ways that I’ve connected with God. The minister, Michael, and the youngest of the 3, was about our age. He had a great lesson on 1 Corinthians, and at the end, he gave us a few questions to discuss amongst ourselves for a few minutes. Application stuff. They’ve been talking about stories of faith, and a couple came forward to give their testimony about what God has done in their lives. It was really neat and I felt like an idiot for fighting Benny on going there. It was very different from what we’re used to. Different is good. The kids loved their children’s worship time too, and we’re going to visit again this Sunday.

I kept teasing Benny saying people would laugh at us…”How’d you find your church? Oh, we were surfing the internet one night…” 🙂 I won’t say we’ve found the place we’re going to settle into. We need to visit a bit more first and get to know some people before making that decision. Isn’t that a great name? The Journey?