The miracle I've missed seeing

For a few brief stretches of my life- and this is one- I have been a 'normal' person on Sunday mornings. 'Normal' in this case means 'not working in a church so that I have to be in worship every Sunday.' Right now, worship is actually optional. Nobody makes me go, and there are no consequences if I don't.

Right now, there more reasons to not worship than ever before. There's the obvious stuff- more rest, less hassle, etc etc, but right now there's a lot that goes with having small kids. Our 14 month old has a habit of falling asleep in the car on the way, leaving us with the choice of either him being irritable all morning or one of us staying in the car & missing some or all of worship. He also screams his head off when we try to leave him in a nursery, so we end up taking him in, and you can imagine how that goes. Our 4 year old loves worship, but she gets bored pretty easy and is so full of energy that it's hard for her to sit still for a few minutes, never mind an hour. She loves the songs, and really likes communion, but it's still hard for her, so it's hard on us. Finally, there's the inevitable sleep troubles that come with having small kids. Some days, we need a caffeine IV just to get out of bed.

Yet almost all of the time we go to worship, and we do it simply because we want to. We want to worship God. We want to praise God. We want to humble ourselves before God and exalt God above ourselves, to sing with our hearts and pray with our souls and think with our minds about how great and wonderful God truly is. We want to do those things, so we go, even when it's not easy. We love God and want to worship, so even though it's not our job, we find a way.

Yet I cannot tell you how very, very good it has been for me to spend some time walking in the shoes of people who don't have to worship every Sunday. I have a newfound appreciation for the stress that can be involved in getting to worship and the lure of staying home. At the same time, I know that when people love God, they will find a way to make it to worship. Not absolutely every week- I get that. But most of the time, folks who have a deep love for God will find a way to get to worship and express that love. And those are the people that are there on Sunday mornings.

So now, when I look around the room in worship, I don't look at the seats that are empty and lament that more people aren't there. That's what I used to do when I looked out over the crowd- wonder where everyone was and why they weren't here. Instead, now when I look out over the community on Sundays I am amazed not just at how many come on a given week, but how many come almost every week when there are plenty of other things they could be doing. I think I took that for granted before because I had no idea what it took for some people to make it to worship every week.

Now I have a sense of what a struggle it can be to get out of the house to express that love in worship on Sunday morning, and I'm amazed at what God has done. More can be done, but what's there is a miracle that I've missed for years, but miss no longer.

The emails from nowhere, that aren't

I get discouraged. Not all the time- most of the time, I'm pretty upbeat about how this process of birthing a church is going. But sometimes, I do get discouraged. I can't really put a finger on when it happens or why it happens sometimes and not others, but I know it happens. I have days where it feels like I'm paddling upstream and still going backwards, and it gets overwhelming sometimes.

I've noticed that when that happens, strange emails keep showing up. Emails from people that I've never met, or folks that I completely would not expect to get that kind of email from, and they all say the same thing: "You're doing great, the vision is great, I'm praying for you, keep it up. You're doing great, I'm praying for you, keep it up." It's happened over and over again, these emails from nowhere.

Those emails from nowhere are actually from somewhere. They are God working through unexpected people to encourage, strengthen and fortify me for the task ahead. I don't have a large community to support my work, so God is pulling at people from the strangest places and working through them to give me the strength I need. It's amazing. Wonderfully, powerfully amazing. God loves me, God is looking out for me, and God wants this to succeed and is going to make it happen. And when I forget that, God sends miracles to remind me.

I am truly blessed.