Fasting and the Feast of the Returning

I am awake with joy this morning.  

A long endurance of six months ends 

as this Sunday dawns with an eager return to my community of faith.

My tribe, my peeps, my beloveds.  That essential place of belonging that every human soul needs to survive and thrive.  God knows, so He invented the Church.  And I love His Church, as flawed as she/we may be.  And I especially love the Church that gathers together and calls herself/ourselves Highview.

This is a community I've loved recklessly for what seems like my entire life.   So these months apart, although necessary and wisely planned, turn out to have been a wretched-wondrous opportunity for a kind of fasting.  Fasting - The deprivation of something longed for and the hungers evoked in doing so, and the clarity that comes when you're just that needy.   So beautifully humbling is this neediness, and I have been humbled, oh so humbled by my neediness these long, long months.

The intensity of my hunger for worship and receiving Communion with people to whom I belong was shocking, and disorienting, and unnerving.   My need for the touch of friends, to be embraced, to be spoken to with affirmation became cravings that threatened my sense of self.  Without the 'together' of life for this past while, I found myself alone in ways I had never had to be before.

And it forced me into God's heart.  

Pushed me there with an alarming force.  

And there He reminded me of the two things.  

One, He is enough.  

Two, I was created for connection.

Over a long ministry of preaching and teaching I have expounded on a theology of community, likening it to the Divine Community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, explaining that our need for connection is one of the ways we bear the image of God, citing Scripture texts in abundance that call us to love and be loved, know and be known.  I've preached it.  And the thing is, these six months I found out in real time, in sharp ways, it's all true! Like, really, really true. 

It really is true that we need each other to be whole spiritual beings. 

It really is true that our corporate offering of worship reorients us to True North.

It really is true that we share in the Bread and the Cup in sacred ways when we take it together.

It really is true that love is the main thing.

And love sustains and love feeds and love bears and love rejoices.

And today, oh day of feasting, this day I return.  My hungry heart comes home. 

Home to a new way of being, with sensitivity and submission and great awareness of what's weird about it.  But a new way of being I'm so very willing to figure out, just for the privilege of being home.

I am so very grateful for my God who is enough.
I am so very grateful for the Elders of Highview who have invited me to stick around in this new thing.
I am so very grateful to Pastor Erin for her grace and courage to take some risks with me as we continue to serve Highview together in different ways.
I am so very grateful for my husband Ken who has held me through these difficult months.
And I am so very grateful for my community of faith, for being so amazing that it hurt that much to be away from you.

And now.....the fast is ended.  

Let the feasting begin!