For Wilshire Baptist Church
It was great to hear the sound of college football in the house on an early fall Saturday. I wasn’t even really watching — my team wasn’t playing — but still I loved the sound: the crowd noise, the tweets of whistles, the rumble of drum lines, the rising and falling of the announcers’ voices. It’s been part of my fall Saturdays for years and it creates a certain familiar cozy feeling deep down in my subconscious. To me it is a signature sound of fall and it signals all that will follow: cooler weather, busy calendars, holidays on the horizon.
In much the same way, we turn on the computer screen every Sunday morning – religiously. There’s something about the sights and sounds of church that resonate deep within me: the chiming of the hour, the quiet organ prelude, the prayers and scriptures, the hymns and solos, the preaching of the word, the often-rollicking postlude. There’s no place else that I get the same soul-satisfying sensory stimulation.
And yet, these experiences are incomplete. The sights and sounds leave me hungry for more, because I don’t enjoy football and church solely for the sights and sounds. Rather, it’s the in-person fellowship and relationships that stir my soul and feed my spirit, and I can only get that by actually being in those places. The video screens will have to do for now, but I prefer to be shoulder to shoulder in the pews and stands — offering signs of peace and high fives to those around me as the location dictates.
While we don’t know when we’ll get to sit together again, we can learn from these time outs and times away. It’s richly ironic and perhaps instructive that we must be good sports as we wait and watch our favorite sports from a distance. And we must wait with faith to return to the worship that feeds our faith. Sometimes it’s in the waiting where we rebuild our resolve and reorder our priorities.