A brief story about friendship, community, and prayer:

Two friends sat next to each other in church. They were both weepy, filled with all the complicated emotions that each were sorting through. One friend had just lost her father to insidious cancer that snatched him too early. The other friend is moving; it is a wonderful new beginning for her family, but also filled with the complications of saying goodbye to a community they have loved. 

These two have become friends in church. At the beginning of service they were not sitting next to one another, but their children. Each announced in church their prayers: finding a new community, a mom who is alone after forty years and their joys: a new home with an incredible backyard, a month of dying that was a master-class in love. Each request was met with tears of acknowledgement and sighs. (I sometimes wonder if the very act of releasing breath for someone else is a direct prayer to God. We tend to sigh a great deal in church when we share our prayer requests.)

By the end of service the two friends were sitting beside one another in the pew, as if huddled together to capture all the love that was present in the room to take home with them. They were not comparing their joy or their sorrow. The daughter who had just lost her beloved father was not telling her friend that her apprehension about leaving was minor in comparison to the grief she was processing. They were not comparing their joy or their sorrow. There was no meter to measure what emotions mattered more.

I am positive God does not measure our hurt nor our joy. We don’t have to hurt a certain amount for God to pay attention. And our joy doesn’t have to be so loud, so exuberant, for God to notice. These two friends, tucked together in a solitary pew, knew that. Both were receiving what they came for: reminders that this beautiful and scary world is infused with God’s loving presence. They reminded each other of that love, they reminded the community gathered around them of that love, and we, as the church, reminded them of that love. It is an ever continuing circle that I enter every week as I step into the holy space of God’s gathered people. 

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