Ann and I will be married for 39 years this coming August. It was our love for God and one another that brought us together, but there has now developed another reason for us to stay together: necessity. The joke in our family is: “I remember half the things and Ann remembers have the things; so together we make one whole.”
I think that reality (and sadly in many ways it has become a reality LOL!) of needing each other to get through the day, holds true when it comes to our relationship with our church. It is easy in the course of a week to forget God and forget the importance of worshiping our Lord and Savior. It is easy to forget that all the things we have, and all the blessings we have received are gifts from God and we need to say, “Thank you.” It is easy to forget that Jesus is the one who travels with us day and night; protecting, loving, and guiding us. It is easy to forget how God helps us make right decisions. It is easy to forget that God is the God who loves us regardless of our failures, and will love us into eternity.
It is so easy to forget all these things.
That is why we need to be connected to our church -- it is the other half of us and together it makes us whole.
I have been reading one article after another about how because of Covid-19, many have not been coming to church and because of that, the fear is that they have found other things to do with their Sunday’s, and because of that they won’t be coming back to church. I too have that fear. It is easy in our loud and busy world, to forget about God, or put God on the back burner.
But know there are consequences to this: when you stop coming to worship, you stop being a part of a community of faith. You lose your faith family and just as we mourn when someone isn’t at the family table on Thanksgiving in our homes, we mourn the person absent from church. To stop coming to worship means we lose that reminder that God is much bigger than our concepts of him. To forgo worship is to make God fit into your understanding of him, which is faulty and small.
Even as a pastor, I sometimes I get so caught up in the busyness, that God falls into the background. When that happens, I know I have to do two things: Re-center my life around God and secondly, get to church!
On Sunday I need worship just as much as anyone else. I need to celebrate the Lord that brings us together, the forgiveness we get and share, the recentering of our lives around God and God’s message, the sharing the sacred meal, remembering our identity as God’s beloved children, and being reminded to live with compassion and love in the coming week.
The joke in our family is that Ann and I NEED to be together out of necessity. There is some truth to that. A greater truth still is this: we NEED to be together as a church.
~ God bless, Dan