Sunday sluggishness
Nice to enjoy the patio again without fear of random interruption from our landlord. It's been good to swap stories: our upstairs neighbors are enjoying the same relief, and one of our former upstairs neighbors dropped by and commiserated with us over beer yesterday.
Wireless connection sucks out here, though. Would love to do something about that.
As I've observed before, Sunday mornings have a nasty drag to them. For me, some of it is just knowing how much the day going well depends on others, from our getting up and heading out all the way through to the end of the second service. On top of that comes welcoming others, keeping an eye out for problems and solutions, completing necessary tasks, answering questions, catching up with friends, and so on. And in this mix (I often need to remind myself) is worship. It can be hard to really let that be foremost with all the rest-even left to my own devices, there's something in my flesh that avoids and rebels, but coordinating things gives me many more layers of distraction.
The proverbial back-breaking straw is how much I'm interacting with others' different approaches to (and resistance to) worship. As with most churches, people come to worship services for a host of reasons, and many of the reasons that aren't worship tug at me. Friends catch up in the lobby during services and have to be asked to quiet down. Kids get away from parents and run around (just being kids, and most of our kids are fantastic, but the world's not as safe as they believe it is or we'd like it to be, even on Sunday morning). People serving need direction, which is often a repeat of information they've already been given. Volunteers who show up late or not at all need to have their duties covered.
All of this is part of being an open, worshipping community, and I'm firmly convinced the gospel calls us to be this-it would creep me out to no end to be the kind of "focused" church that's not only not invitational to others, but is even off-putting to ourselves in our various states. We should be able to come as we are, and that's not going to look the same from week to week or person to person, or even within the same person from one week to the next. So serving as I do is both my job and part of my own worship (which is hard to remember). I just wish there were more of us "on the line," and I wish there were more individual responsibility and shared burden for creating and being an atmosphere where God is worshipped.
My struggle is hardly "suffering," and there's a lot I can learn from my own heart in it. It just makes me sluggish when it's go time.
Wireless connection sucks out here, though. Would love to do something about that.
As I've observed before, Sunday mornings have a nasty drag to them. For me, some of it is just knowing how much the day going well depends on others, from our getting up and heading out all the way through to the end of the second service. On top of that comes welcoming others, keeping an eye out for problems and solutions, completing necessary tasks, answering questions, catching up with friends, and so on. And in this mix (I often need to remind myself) is worship. It can be hard to really let that be foremost with all the rest-even left to my own devices, there's something in my flesh that avoids and rebels, but coordinating things gives me many more layers of distraction.
The proverbial back-breaking straw is how much I'm interacting with others' different approaches to (and resistance to) worship. As with most churches, people come to worship services for a host of reasons, and many of the reasons that aren't worship tug at me. Friends catch up in the lobby during services and have to be asked to quiet down. Kids get away from parents and run around (just being kids, and most of our kids are fantastic, but the world's not as safe as they believe it is or we'd like it to be, even on Sunday morning). People serving need direction, which is often a repeat of information they've already been given. Volunteers who show up late or not at all need to have their duties covered.
All of this is part of being an open, worshipping community, and I'm firmly convinced the gospel calls us to be this-it would creep me out to no end to be the kind of "focused" church that's not only not invitational to others, but is even off-putting to ourselves in our various states. We should be able to come as we are, and that's not going to look the same from week to week or person to person, or even within the same person from one week to the next. So serving as I do is both my job and part of my own worship (which is hard to remember). I just wish there were more of us "on the line," and I wish there were more individual responsibility and shared burden for creating and being an atmosphere where God is worshipped.
My struggle is hardly "suffering," and there's a lot I can learn from my own heart in it. It just makes me sluggish when it's go time.