This discovery came on the day I estimated my tax bill next week to demand $6,000-9,000. (The more my company has grown, the bigger all the numbers have gotten—and the more drastic the swings between feast and famine.) The $10,000 we had saved to get us through the winter was almost down to pennies, as our personal checking teetered on the edge of negative numbers. Uncharacteristically, we’d been buying groceries (and dinners out alike) on our Discover card without the cash to immediately repay, to the tune of over $6,000.
I stopped work, knelt on the berber-on-concrete floor of my office, and asked God to give me faith to trust him. I asked him to lay it on my clients’ hearts to honor their debts—and several other selfish requests. But I was real with God, like I have been often this past year.
This was Wednesday, two days after Crystal had been honest to tell me that I was personally bankrupt in several of my relationships and perceived intangible resources. I needed to know; I appreciated her candor. But it hurt to stumble on reality.
So, I walked into church low, deflated of confidence. Crystal had to skip the monthly worship and communion service to finish making the Easter stage sets.
I was alone.
I sat near the back. We sang a couple songs. I crouched down between the rows of chairs and prayed prostrate on the floor . . . that God would help me focus on him and not my situation, that I would come to communion with the right heart. I prayed and sang from my knees. After collective prayer, I stood with everybody else for Chris Tomlin’s “How Great is our God.”
As I sang these words, I struggled to say them. Something inside me pushed me to lift my arms, as the Psalmist requests—as my spiritual heritage condemns as “vain glory.” I pushed through my trained restraint, raising my fists above my head, almost victoriously.
I started to cry, pushing the words through my teeth. I was praying those words. The tears became sobs, and my words became mangled sounds mixed with silent heaves. I was releasing the sense of abandonment, the feeling of no control. I couldn’t stop crying, my eyes closed; but I opened my hands. The words were a challenge to me and a challenge toward God, the tears a cathartic release. Finally, I reached to a full stretch with my surgically-repaired shoulder reaching as high as it could. I could feel the strain down my back but no peer pressure.
I was proclaiming God for what I couldn’t feel but what I knew he was.
The music, the tears, the shoulder-blade-shaking stopped as the song faded. I opened my eyes to find that I was the only one thus postured and lowered my arms. I quickly wondered all kinds of things, but quieted them to gratefulness for the moment. For one of the only times of my life, I had offered a sacrifice of praise.
I heard a black preacher one time defend the women who were physically moved during his urban services. People, like the leaders who guided my spiritual journey for so many years, were criticizing them—in their hearts accusing these ladies of seeking attention and acting blessed of some (fake) spiritual prompting. “But you don’t know where they’ve been this week, each week.” He went on to tell about trials typical of their American caste. They were being real with God, Hannahs weeping for their Samuels.
Wednesday night, I got that. I understood.
For years I’d disregarded all the Psalmists’ directions as Jewish culture, non sequiturs with holiness and humility and reverence. I’d considered emotion as a human thing, not a God-inspired connection. God was my conscience, not my betrothed. Church was taking turns with one-way communication—not conversation.
It was religion.
Preachers have brimstoned toward my chair for more than two decades that believers need to tell the world the difference between a relationship with Christ and religion. How ironic it strikes me today that these same men exemplified a funeral-home decorum of worship, as if we were singing eulogies to a Deistic source.
But God is ALIVE! And this Easter weekend, so am I.
