Please Come and Worship with Us...

Six simple words: Please come and worship with us….

When they came through on my phone just after midnight on Saturday, my friend could never have known just how much they would mean to me.  They were literally a lifeline. 

Our little family is in a period of transition.  The transition came swiftly and we were very unprepared for the way it happened.  For the first several hours we were reeling with devastating sadness and loss and overwhelming uncertainty, but it didn’t take long for God’s people to show up in mighty ways.  Calls, texts, and messages of love and support starting coming from 10 different directions but the first moment I knew we were going to be ok was the moment I read the invitation “Please come and worship with us…”  I looked across the room at my very broken husband as I read it to him, and I was wracked with tears as I said, “I want to go.  Can I say ‘Yes!’ Will you be ok?” And he responded, “Yes, let’s go.  I WANT to go.”  And in that moment God whispered deep into my soul that we were going to be ok. 

As a girl who was raised in the church and married in to ministry, I have not received many invitations to church in my life (mostly because I was already there).  But until I was hurting, I had no idea how much an invitation to worship together could mean in someone’s life.  For someone to invite my family, broken as we were, to join them to sing praises, hear powerful promises from scripture, and feel the presence of God together, was healing salve in a gaping wound.   And it made me think… if a simple invitation to come and worship could mean so much to me, what could it mean in the life of someone else? How many times have I been too nervous to ask, so I withheld the invitation.  Or I was ready, but found some way to convince myself they were going to say no, so I just decided not to say anything.  I have vowed to myself that in the future I will remember what a lifeline that invitation was to me when I desperately needed one, and I will strive to throw it to others.

Please come and worship with us…

-Where you are free to share, but we aren’t going to ask any questions

-Where your tears are ok

-Where you will be unconditionally loved

-Where it is ok, to NOT be ok

-Where we will love you where you are

In our time of transition, I am so grateful for that lifeline, and the many others that have been extended to my family through calls, texts, messages, hugs, invitations, encouraging words, and most of all prayers.  God is SO very faithful, and those lifelines have been that reminder.

Please come and worship with us…

²³ Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. ²⁴ And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, ²⁵ not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

         Hebrews 10:23-25 (NIV)