Ducks Part 2

I hope you have had as wonderful a break for the holidays as I have had (and am still enjoying).  It’s been a great time to just be with family, get outdoors, catch up on musical interests, and to read and reflect a little.

In my previous post, I outlined some of the motivators for a significant change of path in my spiritual walk. I am going to spend some time dissecting them – again, largely because I am still sorting things out for myself (the ducks in my head are an unruly bunch and don’t line up easily at times), but also in case anyone else cares to listen in.

Two of them are fairly simple and I think I can dispense with them here. One has to do with attending church in one’s own community, or as close as you can get. My church for the past seven years has been right in my own backyard.  After spending the previous ten-or-so years at a church 40 minutes away, attending locally was a very refreshing change.  The Gospel is all about relationships, and you stand the best chance of building and enjoying those relationships when you see other church folk at the post office, the local high school ball games and other places. It’s easier to get together and be a part of one another’s lives.  If I was going to make a change, I wanted to make it while staying in the neighborhood.

The second reason I want to address here is the pull that liturgical worship has been having on me. This is very subjective, of course. It has to do with the way God wired me and has nudged me along the way. Where I once rejected liturgy out-of-hand as vain, meaningless repetition, it has come to mean a great deal to me.  

For one thing, it is beautiful and full of Scriptural truth. But there is something else. I think it has to do with my growing need to be a part of something that is much bigger than me and bigger than any local church – something that reaches over the centuries and connects way back, to the very earliest Christian church.  Something that has been a part of the lives of countless millions of believers over the past 2000 years or so. I have wanted to step into that stream of rich spiritual history and tradition, to belong to it and to identify with it.  In my private devotional life, I have been engaging in worship that puts me in touch with this - but not on Sunday mornings. That was the one missing piece of the puzzle that needed to be addressed.

Psalm 139 tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, or “wonderfully complex” (NLT). We are each wired differently, and one of the lessons in this for me is to be willing to explore how God wired me and to not be afraid to follow that.  I would never try to persuade anyone that my path is the way to go. I only know that it is the way to go for me.

In future posts I will get into the weightier areas of church history and the contemplative tradition. But not tonight.  I’m still on holiday break, after all. I hope you are too.  Merry Christmas and a Happy and Blessed New Year!