I just ugly cried in a public park downtown.
Don’t worry: they were happy tears. I was overcome with both gratitude and hope.
Minutes before, I felt the hand of a stately African American patriarch on my back, as we prayed with women I also didn’t know. He was taller and broader than me, and I shadowed the eight-year-old whose back felt my hand.
It was one of several directed prayers at One City, a multi-church gathering between the James River and the converted brick warehouses of our restored downtown.
About 15 different pastors took turns leading prayers in between several different people leading worship songs.
The theme of the night was unity, love, and reconciliation in our metro area. The point of the night was the hope of the gospel.
And the source: Jesus. Lots of Jesus.
To be candid, I didn’t originally plan to attend this deal—even after it was in two weeks’ worth of announcements at my church. My skepticism was reinforced with the opening songs, led by a TV personality. But something compelled me not only to stay but also to move toward the stage.
I stood and knelt on the side where the pastors queued for the stage and then returned to the singing and praying crowd. These ministers represented three ethnicities, two languages, and multiple denominations. Their prayers ranged in areas of emphasis, but their scripture readings all came back to the unity and love we were called to be in our culture.
I watched as men and women of different faith traditions hugged each other and responded to prompting in their own ways. I heard prayers that surprised and inspired me—mostly from people I didn’t know. A buttoned-up stranger named Matt came over to pray with me in my hiking clothes and Patagonia hat. (That hat left my head a lot with so many moments of reverence.)
During my stint up front, I looked around the crowd behind me several times and didn’t see anyone from my church. (I found a contingent after the service.) My pastor wasn’t invited to the stage, and our church’s name wasn’t included; but I was standing amidst people with a similar heart for ourselves and for our fractured culture.
This past week, my Facebook, Twitter, and Apple News were filled with political rants, news stories of broken lives, and mostly-justified accusations of the American church at large. It’s been overwhelming.
In Riverfront Park, though, as the shadows and their coolness overtook our grassy field, I was overtaken by what’s right in my world, what’s possible in our world.
I was confronted by my brokenness, my contribution to the mess.
That cry was a release, as I tried to sing. It was healing pouring down my cheeks—my knees in the dirt, my hands stretched high.
God wasn’t done with the encounter. He had more work to do in me.
After a call for help tearing down the stage (that had taken a full production crew to assemble since six in the morning), I headed to the platform to lend a hand. As I waited to disassemble the choir risers, that opening worship singer shook my hand and humbly thanked me for being there. I felt my own prejudice, the weight of my jokes over the years—and the criticism. It was freeing in a way to see someone in a different way.
I left lighter, buoyed by hope. In my chest breathed something bigger than a Tony Robbins motivational thought or the syrup of a Christmas movie. I knew I could be changed, and in that metamorphosis bring contagious impact on the small part of the world I touch.
