Micah J Murray has a good eye: a good eye in photography/film, and a good eye for identifying cultural trends and spiritual truths. His words call out to the weary and cynical, and he has a knack for identifying the soul’s desire, and putting his finger on those tender spots of faith. His is an important, prophetic voice (and I don’t use that word lightly) in a fresh generation of US Christians. Over to Micah:
It crept in slowly, quietly.
Filled its coffee mug in the church lobby and slipped politely into the pew next to us, between the song and the sermon.
Uninvited, unwanted, unexpected.
For a while, it was just there on Sunday mornings. In polite handshakes, perfect music, tidy sermons. We passed in and out of the big front doors too quickly and unnoticed, and the Loneliness went with us.
I don’t know if they changed, or we did. Or if we just got tired of trying. We started skipping services on Sunday mornings, sleeping in. (I don’t think anyone noticed.)
A few months later, I guess we shrugged and realized that we were no longer part of that church.
We tried to find another place to call home. Slipped in and out of the back row of a few more churches. Shook hands and smiled and filled out the visitors’ information cards and took home the bulletins.
But the Loneliness followed us there in the mornings, and drove us home.
I wished that we could belong. I really did. But the Loneliness wrapped its arms around us, and I knew as I slipped in and out of those back pews that they would never be home.
Then it was just a lot of coffee, and a lot of lazy Sunday mornings. Lying on the couch scrolling through Twitter, growing resentful of all the people happily talking about the churches they loved.
It should have been relaxing, to not have to put on pants or drive anywhere, but Sunday morning became the loneliest hour of our week.
As spring turned to summer, I sat out on my porch and watched the sun dance across the grass, and Loneliness sat beside me.
It’s strange how something so simple can feel so heavy.
Loneliness wasn’t content to sit next to us in church. It rode home in the car, took a seat at the table, seeped into the walls of our house.
It sat on my chest squeezing the breath from my lungs.
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I used to think that God was all I needed.
I heard pastors and church people tell me that loneliness was a sign that I don’t quite love God enough, that I need to try harder to be satisfied by Him alone.
That the cure for loneliness is to draw closer to Jesus.
I think they were wrong.
I heard a sermon about community one of those Sunday mornings, alone on my back porch. The preacher said a lot of things that I’d always suspected, but hadn’t often heard from the church.
About how Jesus alone isn’t enough, we need the Church too. About how God has chosen to reveal Himself to us through the community of believers. About how “the Christ in your brother is often easier to see than the Christ in yourself.”
And the Loneliness sat beside me and listened.
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Community isn’t a service that you can slip into unnoticed with a cup of coffee, and vanish from just as quickly after the offering is taken. Community isn’t a scheduled event once a week, listed in the back of a bulletin.
Community is space to breathe, to ask questions, to share stories, to swear profusely, to sit in silence, to whisper of God.
These days community has felt far away, and so God has felt far away too.
There is no simple cure, no waiting for the Loneliness to magically vanish; no waiting for God to appear in its place.
There is only the hard work of looking for community, and in community looking for God.
Micah J Murray: Once upon a time Micah knew everything there was to know about God. One day he found himself admitting that, despite having all the answers, he barely believed in God anymore. With the few shreds of faith he had left, he clung to the hope that God was searching for him, and that he would someday be found. Being found is more of a journey than a destination, and this is where you’ll find Micah today. Slowly picking through all the broken pieces of failed religion, looking for Jesus in the midst of it, being found by Him more and more each day. When he’s not chasing his two small boys around the house, riding motorcycles with his wife, or overdosing on coffee, Micah attempts to scrawl out the words of this unfolding story on the pages of the internet. Find him on Twitter, or his blog, Redemption Pictures.
Over to you:
- “Community is space to breathe, to ask questions, to share stories, to swear profusely, to sit in silence, to whisper of God.” Where do you experience that authentic Christian community? (Are you still looking?)
Having grown up in a small community and church where everyone knew everyone, it was real cultural shock when our family moved to the big city of San Jose, CA. To our advantage, in 1960, everyone else was from some place else too. Our family soon connected with two other family with five children in them. Since none of us had relatives rear by, we did a lot of things together and became lifetime friends.
I soon became a part of a very active youth group in that church and with a Bible study group that met weekly at my school.
What did I learn from those experiences? You have to become part of small groups within the church to really get acquainted and feel a part of the fellowship.
On the other hand, I agree that many churches are not friendly enough. I have on occasion visited churches other than my own and deliberately left my Bible at home, just to see how I would be received. In one I attended a Sunday School class of about 20 women in which everyone had a Bible except me. Not one of them offered to share with me. There was even a shelf of Bibles nearby and no one offered to loan me one of them. Used to making myself at home in church as a pastor’s wife, I just got up and helped myself to one. To everyone’s amazement, I was able to look up all the passages and quietly returned the Bible to it place on the shelf at the end of class. No one spoke to me the whole time. Needless to say, I didn’t return there.
In another church there was a lot of emphasis on missions and Christian service. Every group had to have a “project” in which they participated however on Sunday a.m. there were little clusters of friends around the coffee and donuts area and when I walked into the sanctuary I again found little groups of friends engaged in conversation with one another. On two occasions I sat alone for 15min. before the service started without a single person trying to engage me in conversation! I didn’t stay at that church either!
The third group was a small group of about 40 people who met in a shopping strip location. Not only was their worship service something out of the 50’s, but as I looked around at the ethnic mixture of the crowd I began to feel like a minority. Then I thought, hey, you’re Anglo. They don’t know your married name is Lopez! It didn’t matter, I knew no one in my family would feel at home there either.
I am happy to say that I am now a part of a large community church where people of all ethnic groups are welcome. It doesn’t matter how you dress and you are free to worship as you wish. You can take an active part or you are welcome to just sit there and watch. I am part of a Sunday School class and a small group study which meets once a week in a home. They both share prayer requests and actually prays for each other during the week.
I say all that to encourage you to keep trying. It is so nice to have friends supporting me in difficult times and laughing in the good times. The New Testament church was a community and I believe there are many, many lonely people out there who are looking for someone to be their friend even in those churches we are talking about. Sometimes you just have to be the one to reach out and make yourself at home! God bless you each one and I will be praying for your continued spirtitual growth.
It was so wonderful to read this today as I can relate so well to everything you’ve said. I’ve attended several churches ever since I received Christ into my life at 13 and I’m over 40 years older now. What drove me away from them all was the realization that they were all judging me based on assumptions rather than reality. Not attending every service and prayer group, etc was more important to them than how my life and heart were doing. I had perfectly valid reasons for not being able to attend every service, yet no one ever seemed interested in my spiritual life was, just that I behaved like “good Christian girl”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. They told me I mustn’t love God enough if I couldn’t/wouldn’t put all my time into church events.
This happened at every church I tried to be a part of (all evangelical oriented). This judgement even made me question my own faith. Could they be right about me? Was I a slacker Christian? I knew in my heart and soul I wasn’t, so I gave up trying to fit in somewhere, even as recently as this past spring. I did really love the feel of the church but I’m now so afraid of going through that whole judgement thing again that I didn’t go back. I think to my loss. It feels safer connecting with others here and a few other sites with similar feels, that are totally supportive and completely non-judgemental, with a real sense of community. I’ve opened my heart to God far more since following and participating in these blogs than I had in years. So thank you Micah, and Tanya for allowing myself and everyone to come and “worship” together in this community.
Tanya and Micah … thank you for this … it is the place of my deepest pain, I will tell you .and more than a little terrifying at times b/c I am 58 and I feel at times (not always 🙂 ) like I have used up my chances for deep intimate inner circle connecting. When that pain hits, it is overwhelming and feels never ending … which is why I almost did not read this 🙂 It of course ends and I gain perspective in the center of it … and I lean harder than ever into God … I am left with how do I create the quality of authentic community that I so long for? Answers arrive when the questions are put out there …
Oops … I thought I unclicked the box …
These are words I’ve needed to hear for a very long time. I lost the community of church when I became housebound eight years ago (although problems began a few years before when I was struggling with undiagnosed illness and could no longer participate in the way that I used to). I have wrestled with feelings of guilt ever since that Jesus ought to be enough for me but somehow wasn’t. I just thought that I must be a terrible Christian. Reading other people’s Facebook pages describing their wonderful experience of their supportive and sociable church can be deeply painful for me. Sometimes my circumstances have strengthened my faith, often I have struggled to cling to the last vestiges of a tattered faith, and always I have felt the gaping hole of loneliness and hurt left by the absence of Christian community in my life. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody but in a strange way it is a comfort to know that I am not the only one to have felt these things.
We don’t belong. It’s depressing, and hurts both us and our children in one way or another, but the fact remains. I know it’s mostly our fault (social discomforts and/or ackwardness) but that fact doesn’t make it any easier to accept or any less painful to face.