Sunday Morning

Sunday mornings can be chaos around here. Loading into the van to travel to worship is the resolution of a complex and shifting algorithm, which incorporates a wide range of factors. Factors like cleanliness of "church clothes" and the wrinkliness thereof; how much sleep everyone got the night before; relative priority placed on the brushing of teeth; and how quickly a three-year-old will eat a doughnut.

Now that we are sojourners away from our home church, the uncontrollable factors continue after loading into the van. Before today, we had not been repeat visitors at any church here since we landed six weeks ago. One Sunday morning we got so lost on our way that we spent an hour and a half in the car without making it to a worship service at all (the next Sunday we knew how to get there, though! We'd had lots of practice).

Anyway, this morning we went back to the same church we visited last week, which reduced the chaos in finding a location and knowing how to transition into worship (this morning I knew exactly where to find the crayons).  This church is the one nearest our house, which makes us happy in a "parish" sense of neighbors knowing one another and worshipping together. Indeed, many of the surnames of the people we've met at the church match the names in the church graveyard. The new pastor is about to move into the parsonage across the street.

I had been hoping to worship at an Anglican or Episcopal church during this year away--among other reasons, I find the prayers and services of the Book of Common Prayer intensely beautiful. For various reasons, that is not going to work out. Neither is the pre-Revolutionary stone church with stained-glass windows that I envisioned.

Instead, though, we have two minutes away a Dutch Reformed church--a different kind of liturgy, and a different kind of beautiful, and with different European roots. There is a gallery upstairs. There are pews with doors and numbers on them. There is an organ that is played with skill and grace, communicating majesty as perhaps only an organ can. Yesterday after the service the organist invited Bud and Wombles upstairs for a tour, and later I heard "Jesu, Joy of Men's Desiring" as Bud played the melody and the organist accompanied him.

While most of the congregation is elderly, there has been a warm and enthusiastic welcome of us and our children. I had a flashback to Greece and the wood shop after I saw Wombles up in the gallery above and started vehemently directing him to Come down!  because that was not where he was supposed to be! --because immediately a woman cut in on me to sweetly but directly inform me that the organist had invited the two boys up there and had opened up the organ (I don't even know what that means) and was giving them a tour. With a smile that said clearly, "So you just let them stay up there."OK. Message received. I am a control freak.

The building was finished in 1832, after local congregants wanted to stop driving the 3-4 miles to the nearest Dutch Reformed Church. So really, this is a very old church plant. And I deeply appreciate the desire to go to church in one's own neighborhood. Having to wrangle the six of us out of bed, through breakfast and into the van can be complicated enough on Sunday mornings without adding the potential mishaps and delays of travel. There's no algorithm that can accurately predict just how long the whole process will take. I guess that was as true in the 1820s as it is today.

I am grateful to have found a place to worship for the next three seasons, and grateful for those who have been praying for us. I miss our church at home. And I look forward to seeing how God will bless us and hopefully use us to bless others during this season on the road.

Eek! Snow!

The sermon text Sunday was Matthew 21:33-46. As the pastor was reading it on Sunday, he paused just long enough at "go to..." that my mind immediately filled in a line from a song we sing at CPC. I had it running in my head for the entire service, contributing to a strange, two-places-at-once feeling that was both homesick and at-home at once. You can listen to the song here, much like it sounds back home in Santa Barbara: