The comfy, grey chairs are lined into neat rows. The music of the Sunday service is washing across the full room.
♫ You are my God and my
King. You are the words that I sing.
I look around to the people filling the chairs, familiar and
unfamiliar, the souls gathered together on this morning, as they do most every
seventh day of the week, and I am struck by the flaws tainting each of our lives.
As I age in this world and gain wisdom, in the ever-so-small
flecks that I do, I have come to understand how we each carry heavy burdens. We all suffer. We are all broken – by
the world we live in and by our own fallible selves.
♫ You are comfort, You
are refuge. You are love personified. And You are kindness and compassion, You
are.
The blonde-haired, gum-chewing friend who is over-extended
in her career…
My gracious Bible study leader, whose tiny body is racked
with the injuries of being hit by a car years ago…
The insecure junior-higher, with her thin arms folded across
her abdomen, whose father reaches over to put his arm around her…
The quiet friend that makes her husband finish his donut
before they come inside, who lost her son earlier this year…
The imperfection of our lives… the imperfection of our
selves... This is humanity.
♫ You are glory,
Hallelujah. You are hope of peace on earth. You are alpha and omega, You are.
I would not venture to say there is equality in the
magnitude of our individual suffering. But there is equivalence in
the suffering itself; that we will all suffer, we will all fail is among our common threads. The question lies in what purpose does our suffering serve? Or, more than
that, what purpose does our life serve?
Our own joy, our own
glory, our own lives are too small a thing to live for.
♫ You are holy, You are
faithful. You are savior, You are friend. You are all I'll ever need Lord, You
are.
The hope of a purposeful existence – a hope that in-turn offers
a peaceful existence today. That’s why I’m here.
That’s why we’re all here. (Well, that and the donuts.)
♫Lyrics are from You Are, by Mark Roach
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