I needed to go to church this morning. I needed to see my church family, pray with them, sing with them, worship with them. I didn't care if anyone else in the house got up and went with me, but my soul needed to be fed. I had been beating myself up a bit because I haven't made it to any of our church's special Lenten services, nor have we gone to Sunday morning service at all in the past month or so. I know my salvation is not dependent on how often I attend, but I had been feeling like a slug in that department lately and really needed to be lifted up.
So I went. By myself. It felt like I had been driving for days and finally made it home.
The Gospel lesson for the day? The parable of the prodigal son.
Heh.
The sermon? All about grace. The amazing grace offered up to each one of us by a loving God, and the somewhat ephemeral grace we humans offer one another.
The prodigal son and the grace with which his father accepted him upon his return. Now that's the kind of message I was needing today.
It was a busy week followed by an even busier weekend. I'm exhausted. Steve was home for the weekend - physically anyway - but spent much of that time frustrated over an issue at work. We did do a little bit of shopping with the kids Saturday and then Steve and I had a nice dinner out Saturday evening. Church this morning followed by social hour, then Girl Scout activities in the afternoon and a visit with some neighbors after that. I never thought I'd say this, but once again I'm looking forward to cleaning up and resting up from the weekend and getting back to the monotony of my Monday routine.
I always love Mondays just for that reason -- the monotony after the usually crazy weekend!
ReplyDeleteWe just started attending a new church because they have a family room where we can let our overly attached 1 year old play and we can watch the sermon on TVs (our old church just had a cry room and he wasn't about to sit on our laps for an hour!). We had missed out on church for months! It is so nice to be back -- I feel reconnected!
I'm so glad you found a new church, Cammie! I hope it works out great for your family. The difficulty with ours is that it is quite a drive for us, so it's very easy to say we'd rather sleep in on Sunday morning. I have "shopped around" for another church, but I always felt drawn back to this one, which is the one I attended growing up. There's something to be said for being somewhere where everyone knows you and genuinely cares about you.
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