I am bunched up tight, pulled together and mulling in the seat next to the elderly man who visits his wife everyday even though her mind slipped and who moves a chair out of the row Sunday mornings so that her chair can roll to rest next to his and on my left is husband and our friend who shares the same language as the original text and who has seen more war and unrest in his life than anyone else I have met and behind us are the new friends who just arrived from an earlier service at a different church and who fill their evenings with church meetings and studies and together gathered in these blue seats we are a congregation and I am not sure what this means sometimes.

Are we the audience or is He?

This is what I have to check myself with when I feel my heart start to darken and my thoughts narrow into sharp little things that start to break it all down into something easy and powerless.  It being the church, of course.  And I know the danger-- the brazenness of that.

We are one song in and I am sitting there, dripping in Paul, still wrestling Paul because I can get more out of him-- I know it.  I am reading about being poured out and still rejoicing.  Hard.  I am flipping to Isaiah and reading the Year of the Lord again because it sets my heart on track every time.  I am finding strength and I am listening to His people sing and I am praying for a better heart, praying to keep the cynicism out, praying to be gracious and open and most of all I am praying that He would keep me hungry.

I am listening to a sermon that is the last in a series on social media and I am wondering at the culture fostered in the church.  He is telling me fine things.  He is challenging me to pick my friend group carefully and I can not argue with that.  But I am sitting in a congregation that has spent weeks on the topics of friending and unfriending and I am wondering at this task:  choose a friend like Jesus chose the three closest?  A tall order.  A fast order.  And there goes my heart-- lurching and stamping and stewing.

I tell myself that husband and I will read something very challenging and deep.  Some Chesterton or Bonhoeffer or maybe C.S. Lewis if we want to take it a little easier.  We will sign up for the third small group and maybe this time it will stick.  I'll do better at being with Him.  I'll read Paul and Peter.  I'm in the car and I'm almost in tears, again.  I can't help but remember the hot gatherings in Mali, the people who held tender the ragged book of John--so proud to have a bit of The Word.  I'm seeing the face of the pastor I read about this morning, locked in Iran and tortured a year long and I am hearing Paul's words dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed and I am yearning for the body.

I am hungry, thank God I am hungry, and I want to learn John, Timothy, Abraham, David.  I want to be led through the Wilderness.  I want to fight for the Promised Land.  I want to be exiled and redeemed, exiled and redeemed.  I want to bleed-- on the cross with Our Lord, in prison with Paul, with Peter who is writing to the church that suffered Nero's madness.  My goodness, I want The Word and I want to fill slow on it with His people because we still can and it feels cold not to, it feels small.

It is so easy to take a thing that is His and to turn it over without seeing the beauty, the divine truth of it.  I want to be very careful.  Because I love the church, fiercely.  Because I was just this morning sitting in a blue chair next to a man decades devoted to his wife and a friend who understands the text in a way I cannot and new friends who are actively feeding their hunger and husband-- a man who wants to know more of His holiness, a man who just last week reminded me that we follow a God who would smite us with glory.