Sublime

I began to feel like the sort of Christianity that I gravitated toward only required my brain.

I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this big story of brokenness and redemption—in a small, gray, stir-crazy Tuesday morning.

The words of the liturgy felt like a mother rocking me, singing over me, speaking words of blessing again and again. I was relaxing into the church like an overtired child collapsing on her mom.

What I found was that it was the prayers and practices of the church that allowed me to hold to—or rather to be held by—God when little else seemed sturdy, to hold to the Christian story even when I found no satisfying answers.

We need this kind of embodied beauty—smells and bells—in our gathered worship, and we need it in our ordinary day to remind us to take notice of Christ right where we are.