Just like home… | Southside Community

Warm cinnamon buns, hot coffee, beautiful music, welcoming people.  I loved everything about Southside.  The message was powerful, refreshing and painfully timely all at once. 

The building had the character and warmth of your favorite pair of old blue jeans, signs of age only adding to the comfort.  I was struck by a few things:

§  the overwhelming focus on community outside of the comfort of the church walls.  From prayers of gratitude and blessing for the local elementary school …to a letter of read in thanks for a fundraiser that the church ran over the holidays for several local non-profits…to sharing how their team had been blessed at Nightshift (which just reminds me how very much I miss my friends on the street).

§  The number of children – that were not only acknowledged but engaged in the service.  How very comfortable they were…and how one in particular caught my eye as she sat engrossed in something in her well worn bible.

§  The sermon was illustrated by the closing scene to Pretty Woman.  Seriously.  Fantastically.  Great. (almost as great as Ian's Monty Python, almost!)

So what’s the catch?  It’s the same catch as last week and the week before that….there is beauty and perfection and imperfection in just the right amounts…in all these places. 

This sense of “homelessness” I feel reminds me how very small I am in the bigger picture, for better and worse.

I remember a friend describing to me once what it was like to meet her birth family/relatives in her thirties…there was so much about them that was rich and wonderful – making her feel like she belonged in a way she hadn’t experienced before with mannerisms and likes/dislikes that had always been unique to her.  A new and unique sense of belonging.  And yet, she expressed with a sense of both gratitude and guilt how they made her even more grateful for her adoptive family and upbringing…all she had been raised with and the blessing that she had a result. No doubt that her journey of discovery into those new relationships weren’t without challenges. I feel that unlike her, I’ve in many ways left the only family I’ve ever known, and am trying to CHOOSE a new one. 

It feels wrong.

It makes me want to run for my life back to what I know and love.  Except that what I know and love doesn’t really even exist anymore (the relationships do of course, but the community is very different), and more importantly because I am so certain that this decision to journey into the unknown was RIGHT.  I don’t get it, but I think figuring out what I don’t get is part of the reason why.

The catch that I keep coming back to is that church is not what I’ve been describing each week, the experience of walking into a building and meeting some fellow travellers, church is to me a series of intricate relationships forged over time.  Walking into church is like a blind date.  This adventure/journey/process feels (without any disrespect intended) like a season of the Bachelorette…except that—no matter how heart wrenching it is—somehow in the end it will actually work out.

The thing I miss most is knowing that the people I was with knew the worst of me… seen me at my lowest of lows and loved me anyway.  They helped me grow up, they raised me in so many ways.  Tonight I began to search scripture for direction…it talks about community as a body, how we are stronger together than apart, how we are to be light…it talks a lot in the old testament about people stepping out in faith, heading into the unknown, obediently.  40 years seems to come up a few times.   That would be incredibly awkward because I'm quite sure I will be dead or nearly dead in that time.  But I felt the new testament was the place that this journey lies – and was drawn to this verse. 

Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”  “Come,” he said.  Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus.  But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” ~Matthew 14-28-30

I get the sense that this is one of those “if you want to walk on water, you gotta get out of the boat” moments.  I feel like it’s time to settle in somewhere and just trust that He'll be at work in and through me wherever my feet land.  Sinking isn't really an option on the table.  When he calls us to community, the kingdom and living out the servant heart…it’s not going to happen on the sidelines.  

Now the question is where.  Oh look, here I am again...back at the catch...HELP!?