Sundays, These Days
Sundays are hard. They are good, here, but there are so many other Sundays in my head.
We are listening to good sermons here in Indiana, sermons brought with grace and truth to educate or edify or exhort, with thoughtful preparation and practical application. I come away knowing more, encouraged, exhorted, and usually feeling that there is more to do, or to do differently, and I know more with my head and have things to think about. America seems to be a more pragmatic place than where we have been, possibly? I can adjust to that.
But they aren't sermons from Mark. For so many years of Sundays I heard him communicate the freedom from trying to make ourselves right before God, from living Kingdom lives in our own power. He expressed great sympathy for our human foibles, pointing out to us gently and humorously our (his own and his peoples') weakness and self-centeredness, and we came away with not a sense of our own failings but with hope, with a greater picture of God's mercy and strength and purpose, a bigger sense of who He is and where we fit in to His world. One of our church Conseil said the Sunday after Mark died: "I absolutely loved his preaching....I never heard anybody like Mark preach." His own weakness led him to God as his tower of refuge, and that is Who he brought to us. God, more than us.
For so many years of Sundays I worshipped in churches filled with people from a multitude of cultures and countries, those measurable differences the prisms that refracted our usual uniquities into myriads. I miss the conversations after church in Albanian, French, Macedonian, Chinese, German high and low, Alsatian, the variety of clothes, the new foods, the pictures of life I'd never seen before.
One thing has stayed the same - not the number of cultures, but still the multitude of experiences. People are individual; whether a group of ten internationals or ten Yorktownies, we each have a story different from the one next to us. I am glad to find that "Hoosier" does not mean "the same" any more than "international" does. We can have fifteen kinds of casseroles instead of fifteen kinds of foods. I'm okay with that.
For so many years of Sundays I sang my heart out, sang my soul empty and filled. I still haven't put my finger on why the worship is different in the international churches we were part of, but it is. We worshipped as before the throne, singing to God unconscious of time, about Him, about His truth, goodness, love, compassion, justice, holiness, and being wrung clean in the act of worshipping Him without thinking too much about ourselves, although that came in pieces along the way.
So far American musical worship seems either pragmatic and functional (now we are singing a song, please sit for the offering, now we are singing two songs...) or emotional but mainly concerned with us (we are overwhelmed by your love, your love for us, how you love us, us, us...). That, I'm not sure I'll adjust to, really - I can find different places and times to worship besides Sunday mornings, but my guess is Sunday morning worship will most often feel flat. I think I can accept that.
For so many years of Sundays Mark and I sat next to each other, singing with each other's voices, glancing out of the corners of our eyes at those things we both found humorous or touching or helpful.
There's not much adjusting to that.
And then for so many years of Sundays Mark and I sat in different rows, he ready to lead or preach, I picking up the mood, emotions, lives of the congregation and listening to his sermon, the one we had talked through almost every day of that week and that we would talk through again on Monday before he left it behind for the next one. It was our day to hear what the larger group needed, so we knew how we could serve them in the weeks coming.
My community is no longer my responsibility - not in the same way, anyhow, and I am learning how to relate with them in a new way. I am not quite sure what that is yet but fumbling toward it, standing at the edge of something, the merging and emerging of a path, appreciating the world in which I am and so missing the world in which I was. The next step, I think, is figuring out how, and when, to take the next step, to bring what I had into what I have. I am nowhere near that yet.
Sundays are a focused, compressed picture of all of that. So - hard. Good, but hard.
We are listening to good sermons here in Indiana, sermons brought with grace and truth to educate or edify or exhort, with thoughtful preparation and practical application. I come away knowing more, encouraged, exhorted, and usually feeling that there is more to do, or to do differently, and I know more with my head and have things to think about. America seems to be a more pragmatic place than where we have been, possibly? I can adjust to that.
But they aren't sermons from Mark. For so many years of Sundays I heard him communicate the freedom from trying to make ourselves right before God, from living Kingdom lives in our own power. He expressed great sympathy for our human foibles, pointing out to us gently and humorously our (his own and his peoples') weakness and self-centeredness, and we came away with not a sense of our own failings but with hope, with a greater picture of God's mercy and strength and purpose, a bigger sense of who He is and where we fit in to His world. One of our church Conseil said the Sunday after Mark died: "I absolutely loved his preaching....I never heard anybody like Mark preach." His own weakness led him to God as his tower of refuge, and that is Who he brought to us. God, more than us.For so many years of Sundays I worshipped in churches filled with people from a multitude of cultures and countries, those measurable differences the prisms that refracted our usual uniquities into myriads. I miss the conversations after church in Albanian, French, Macedonian, Chinese, German high and low, Alsatian, the variety of clothes, the new foods, the pictures of life I'd never seen before.
One thing has stayed the same - not the number of cultures, but still the multitude of experiences. People are individual; whether a group of ten internationals or ten Yorktownies, we each have a story different from the one next to us. I am glad to find that "Hoosier" does not mean "the same" any more than "international" does. We can have fifteen kinds of casseroles instead of fifteen kinds of foods. I'm okay with that.
For so many years of Sundays I sang my heart out, sang my soul empty and filled. I still haven't put my finger on why the worship is different in the international churches we were part of, but it is. We worshipped as before the throne, singing to God unconscious of time, about Him, about His truth, goodness, love, compassion, justice, holiness, and being wrung clean in the act of worshipping Him without thinking too much about ourselves, although that came in pieces along the way.
For so many years of Sundays Mark and I sat next to each other, singing with each other's voices, glancing out of the corners of our eyes at those things we both found humorous or touching or helpful.
There's not much adjusting to that.
And then for so many years of Sundays Mark and I sat in different rows, he ready to lead or preach, I picking up the mood, emotions, lives of the congregation and listening to his sermon, the one we had talked through almost every day of that week and that we would talk through again on Monday before he left it behind for the next one. It was our day to hear what the larger group needed, so we knew how we could serve them in the weeks coming.
My community is no longer my responsibility - not in the same way, anyhow, and I am learning how to relate with them in a new way. I am not quite sure what that is yet but fumbling toward it, standing at the edge of something, the merging and emerging of a path, appreciating the world in which I am and so missing the world in which I was. The next step, I think, is figuring out how, and when, to take the next step, to bring what I had into what I have. I am nowhere near that yet.
Sundays are a focused, compressed picture of all of that. So - hard. Good, but hard.
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