Good morning all! Can you believe it is March? As we say in my family…Rabbit! Rabbit!
A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah.
1 O God, you are my God, I seek you,
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
3 Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
4 So I will bless you as long as I live;
I will lift up my hands and call on your name.
Yesterday I held our first “staff worship” at McMinnville Cooperative Ministries. For a little while, once a month, I am trying to get the staff together to worship for a bit. For once, in a worship space, they aren’t in charge and all they have to do is come. I have also extended what staff means quite a bit. Staff are paid and unpaid, volunteer or around because they have to be. Staff are those who consider themselves as those who work in the church. So for our first staff worship we had about 12 people and that would be about half of what I have considered staff.
I set up worship in the Sanctuary. I had worship orders and knew that this would evolve even within our time together. I had a video all prepped for our discussion and I picked hymns that we could sing acapella. And I had bread and wine all ready for us to eat together (very important to our culture). What was fascinating to me was when people walked in…because every person that walked in, I could see the scan of the room and I knew that moment intimately because it is how I walk into every room in the church. If you are at all involved in the church, you scan to see what is up and how you can help or work in the space. Those of us intimately connected with the inner workings of the church look at the church space differently. We scan to see that all is ok, that we can plug in somewhere, that something might need to be done or someone to be helped. We look at how things are set up and what is expected.
We don’t always walk into worship space ready to worship and yet we long for it.
Yesterday I had us discuss scripture in the context of community. I showed this video that you might enjoy…
And then we talked about how we could be just that amazing together. 🙂 And sure enough pretty soon we started to laugh together and try to figure out how to commune together. We fell into typical raucous CoOp ways and loved every minute of it. We prayed together and silence felt comfortable. All in all, we breathed through the Psalm above because we were thirsting for God and we didn’t even know it yet. And many of us hung out long after the worship was over to check in with one another. What a great success! I can’t wait for next month!
So today your challenge is to find a minute of worship…breathing, reading, not scanning the room to see what you can do but living into the Psalm in thirsting for God and giving great praise.
Peace,
Court
Living in Violet 