To be completely honest I hated the concept of church for the longest time. Your past always defines your present belief system and my past with church was not good. Between nasty men telling you where a woman belongs or no one actually speaking to you, I found the environment awkward and hypocritical. This happened church after church, no matter what small group they told me to join or how involved I was. I can’t really remember a lot of good experiences when I was young and I believed this was it.
However this is not how church should be and its a shame that so many churches are like this! As a Christian I felt lost and unloved, I would never want to know how it would feel to someone who didn’t know Jesus. I gave up on church but kept going because “thats what a Christian does” and I wanted to KNOW God more than anything.
Out of blue my friend invited me to church and I was like sure whatever I’ll try it and i will never forget the feeling of walking through those doors. God was actually there and active, people came to worship God and love their brothers and sisters. It was such a breathe of fresh air but I was still so sceptical about it all. I went home feeling full and pumped on God, was this it, is this how church is suppose to look? I honestly didn’t know the answer to this question but the next week when I woke up and was actually excited to go to church I knew God had brought me something good.
Now I had a lot of walls built up so it took a lot of getting use to. Their whole set up of starting around 10:30ish and not always having a conventional sermon was new to me but their was life and more importantly there was love, Jesus was there. Three years later I’m still excited to go and I actually want to serve and be with people, this is huge!!!! I don’t like community but the more time I spend with the people the less I am afraid or sceptical about the concept of ‘Church’.
My growing love of the church has become most evident when the church leadership made a hard decision and decided to support people over a building. Not only did they say we support the youth program they were joyous about the next steps. Never once did anyone on the leadership team say we did something wrong, they listened, believed our words and supported us fully.
The willingness to be joyful in hard situations, trusting God as the church wanders and expecting God to do something even more beautiful is why I’m learning to love church. BUT more importantly it is teaching me about what church should look like and how I can live in that same spirit.
Going on this journey with 60 others terrifies me! Living in community and actually loving like Jesus seems easy, but probably not! However I am so blessed by the examples of people I have gotten to know and I sure hope a piece of their wisdom has rubbed off on me! So Blessed by my church family!!! (and I am sorta looking forward to the church family on the trip) I expect life on the field to be beautiful.
