This has got to be the most disorganized 500 Words Before Bedtime in the history of 500 Words Before Bedtime. I can see missing one night, but TWO? Two is just shameful.
Nonetheless, shameful or not, here we are. Yesterday, after taking a glorious afternoon nap, I sensed a scratchy throat coming on. It soon morphed into a sore throat plus headache plus fever full-body thing. I thought about writing at 7pm, thought better of it, and went promptly to bed. Now, after spending most of the MLK holiday napping, I’m basically back to full strength. That is to say, I’m at least well enough to write 500 words before bedtime.
I think tonight I’d like to talk about the church service yesterday. I want to try to convey it to you somehow, how remarkable it was in its utter unremarkableness, what meaning there can be in quiet, ordinary things.
Don and I attend a small Presbyterian church in Monroe, Michigan. The congregation, we hear, used to be larger and used to be younger, but we, having only known it as it is, love it as it is.
Yesterday was cold and snowy, leaving even fewer people in the pews than normal. The pastor was out sick, so an elder had been pressed into service. Someone got a text that the music director was stranded with a flat tire. A woman from the congregation hustled forward to take over the piano.
It was Don’s first Sunday as an usher, so I had time to sit and observe quietly for a few moments while he got whispered instructions about protocol. At first, the scene was a little discouraging. “So few people,” I thought, caught without realizing it in that American lie that bigger is more and more is better.
The emergency pianist plunked out the opening bars of “Great isThy Faithfulness.” The congregation rose, and the congregation *sang*. The little choir sang out so that their voices floated over the pews, and the few in the pews sang back to them until the old song swelled and lifted to the rafters, to the silent figures in stained glass looking down on us, and, I think, to the heavens beyond.
Together we confessed; together we prayed; together we listened as the elder spoke of Jesus’ ministry as it begins in the book of John. Two of John’s disciples go to see him.
“What do you want?” he asks them.
“Where are you staying?” they reply.
So they go with him, and in so doing, receive what they desire.
When we rose to go, I felt as full and complete as I had all week.
It was as if, sitting in that nearly-empty sanctuary, fretting over “bigger” and “more,” Christ had leaned down to whisper, “What do you want?”
It was as if I had whispered back, “Where are you?” and received the answer almost immediately in the music of an old hymn: “Here,” was the reply. Always here.”
Great is they faithfulness, Lord unto me.
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