I grew up going to church every single Sunday. I went to Sunday School, Wednesday confirmation classes, week long overnight summer camps, etc. I even went to an ELCA Lutheran four year college for goodness sake. When I moved to Colorado, I went from living a life surrounded by ELCA Lutherans who held very similar beliefs as myself who all went to church every Sunday, to living in an area where I didn’t know a single person my age who even believed in God, much less who went to church. It was a hard transition, to say the least.
Over the past 12 years, I have honestly gone in waves with my church attendance. Some years I go every week and am in the church choir, some seasons I have chosen to ski with friends instead. For a few years I was the part-time church secretary, and yet months will go by that I just cannot find the motivation to take my small children to church and attempt to keep them quiet and still get something out of the sermon.
This past summer has been one of those seasons wherein we have just not gone. We still pray before meals and at bedtime with our kids, and we talk about God and Faith in our house all the time, but Sunday morning church just hasn’t happened.
For the past few days (weeks? months?), my head and heart have been spinning. Between regular work/life stress, marriage stress, my Mom’s cancer diagnosis, and now the Trump presidency, I’ve just been pushed over the edge. I honestly think I’m depressed, and I knew when I woke up today that I needed to make the effort to get to church, whether or not I felt like it.
Today our Minister opened up with a speech about the election. She clearly was struggling with the results as well, though she was doing her best to be open-hearted about it all, probably because we live in an area that’s roughly a 60/40 split when it comes to political parties and beliefs. I greatly appreciated her effort to remind us all that God is above all of this, and though we can’t control how this election has gone, we can control how we treat those around us and what we fight for moving forward, and that’s what matters.
After the Silent Reflections & Prayer, the congregation sang their new “Centering Song,” which they learned last week. Here are the lyrics…
Come and find the quiet center in the crowded life we lead;
find the room for hope to enter, find the frame where we are freed.
Clear the chaos and the clutter; clear our eyes that we can see
all the things that really matter. Be at peace, and simply be.
Um, yeah. I was clearly sobbing by the end of the song. The melody was beautiful, and our congregation sang it slowly and thoughtfully, with so much meaning imbued in our voices and our hearts.
It was exactly what I needed today. 💗🙏🏻🎶
