Where I'm Starting

Thanks to all for the comments on the last post. I had a lovely part two written last night. When I noticed today it wasn't on the blog, I thought perhaps I had saved a draft. No such luck. Was it eaten? Who knows.

I'll give you the short version of my experience on Sunday.

The sermon was "Why Go To Church?" and no, I didn't know that before I went. I'll be honest, what I got from the service came from my head turning flips over itself as he spoke. He used this illustration of the church as a ship giving direction to people who would otherwise be floundering about alone on the stormy sea; I pictured the ship knocking the floaters around, hitting them in the head.

What threw me into the spiritual was something very human, though. Someone sitting near me smelled. I thought about how many people came to church that morning without everything together, how it is (or should be? whatever) OK to come to come to church with your imperfections and how giving up those worries of perfection or expectations of others allows us to experience the spiritual. I thought about how that must have worked with Jesus and pondered that idea of being God and yet human and then without realizing what was coming next, there it was.

It's communion, and I hadn't even looked ahead in the bulletin to see it coming. Somehow in my head "This is my body broken for you" became something like "This is my human-ness. It's all I have that you can understand and I open myself so you can have all of it.".

So that's a start. I'm not telling you it means that everything is changed and I'm going back every time they open the doors, but it's where I'm starting.