(written the week of May 31st)
Our church, like most, has not been meeting during the pandemic shutdown. Fortunately, we have a decades-long history of broadcasting our service on Sunday morning over a local radio station. So we didn't have to figure anything out when the pandemic shut our doors, we just kept doing what we'd been doing for years. The only change was that instead of feeding the sound from inside our sanctuary to the radio station, either live or time-delayed, our pastor and someone who was acting as liturgist would go to the radio station on Thursday to record a pseudo-service. Then the radio station spliced in recorded music and played it back on Sunday morning.
But Sunday morning, in spite of an early sparkling start, by 8:15 or so the weather had turned. Around 8:30, a massive thunderstorm rolled through, with winds up to 69 mph, toppling trees and ripping off branches and knocking out power all over the county. More than 30,000 people were without power by Sunday afternoon. Unsurprisingly, there was a remarkable lack of people showing up in our church parking lot. At 9:40, twenty minutes before the service was supposed to begin, the power at the radio station was out.
Since our plan had been to broadcast the radio program over the sound system--so that both those in the parking lot and those who had stayed home would be hearing the same thing--that put us in a tough spot. Only a few people had arrived at that point, but our pastor made the tough call to cancel the service. We turned some people away, and started texting and calling others to let them know that the service wasn't going to happen.
Then, lo and behold, about two minutes before ten o'clock, the power came back on at the radio station. At that point, there were eight of us still at the church. So one of us opened the doors to his car, cranked up the radio, and the eight of us hung out in the parking lot, sitting in camp chairs or leaning on cars, and listened to the service our pastor and a liturgist had recorded a few days before.
I had had a bad week. And by "bad," I don't mean that bad things had happened to me, I mean that I was my worst self. I had let some things slide at home that really should have been taken care of. I had hurt my sweet mom by inadvertently texting a snarky comment to her instead of to my sisters. I had not met my own expectations in accomplishing a couple of personal goals. Our country was in the midst of the response to the murders George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and I was feeling the collective burden of our national sins. How come we can't stop this? Have I been doing enough? How do we finally change this? To be precise, I was feeling like crap, and hopeless on top of it.
And then I had the experience--one that I've had many times before-- that reminds me why I go to church. The words of the confession seemed to speak right to me, and the forgiveness of sins washed over me, as if rolling away my failures and petty meanness. Forgiveness doesn't change a thing. Not on its own, anyway. I'm still the same person with all my same faults after I've been forgiven as I was before. I'm still responsible for creating change in myself and around me, and I'm still responsible for apologizing to my mom and making things right.
But it reminds me that with all my crap and all my faults and all the ways I can't solve the problems that are right there in front of me, I am still a beloved child of God. For that hour, I can lay my burdens down, the load of failure that threatens to pull me under, and breathe into it, just long enough so that when the service is over, I have the energy and the resources to keep going.
That is all.
(Edited to add 6/24/20: The original version of this has been out there on the RSS feed all along, but I deleted it while I dealt with my narcissistic white liberal guilt over being an idiot. I made a few edits so that I could live with it. It's entirely possible I should have left it in its original state as a marker of my learning curve. But I didn't.)
