sunday.

We take the twenty-five minute auto-rickshaw ride through Sunday-morning-quiet streets, the wind in our faces, chatting and looking at the world flying past us.  In this country there is always more to see and smell and hear than the human body can absorb.

This road is in a part of our city I love; right downtown in the middle of the hustle and bustle and energy.  If we were in New York, we’d be on Fifth Avenue; if in Columbia, SC, The Vista.

But this morning the shops and restaurants are closed, the fruit vendors just parking and assembling their cart-top piles of watermelons and limes and bananas.  The pedestrians amble past us with morning papers and fruit juice and nowhere important to be just yet.

We get out of the auto, and find St. Joseph’s on the corner of a busy intersection.  People climb out of autos and cars and flow all around us in a steady stream into the gates.  We move with the flow, and follow the child-laden group that heads toward a little building off to our right.  Walking with them, we look around, wide-eyed, at the stately old campus with charming stone buildings and breezeways and green trees everywhere.  My beauty-starved eyes drink in all of this loveliness.

After a glance into the children’s service – a group congregated and singing enthusiastically at one end of a big open room, we decide to keep Judah and Amelie with us for now, and head toward the church service.  We follow the crowd up a stone staircase into a big, stone-floored auditorium, where people file into plastic-chair rows or upstairs to a balcony.

There are open windows and ceiling fans and a worship band on the stage in front, leading in the singing of Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord.  And tears fill my eyes over the familiar music and words, over the smiling-faced worship team and the power point song lyrics up on the wall.

We stand and sing, with hundreds of South Asian strangers who are also our family, song after song, and finally I sit down, Judah’s 35-pound frame heavy in my arms.  I rest my cheek against his hair while he snacks on Goldfish crackers sent by his grandparents, and I let the music wash over me and soothe my heart.  When I close my eyes, I feel at home.

I grew up in this church tradition of rented meeting spaces and drum sets and guitars and hands held high in praise.  I was raised and loved through my hardest preteen and teenage years, sitting, teaching with older women on makeshift children’s church floors.  Sunday after Sunday, I was cornered in locker-lined hallways and in grimy cafeterias and hugged and asked to pitch in and help.  Because – no matter that I had a raging heart-full of questions and wasn’t even sure that I believed in all of this we talked and taught and sang about – hands were few and I was needed, doubts and insecurities and teenage acne and all.

And, college-aged, I grew into myself a little bit.  My black-sheep heart came back to the fold and back to the Shepherd – who had never really let me go in the first place.  And my church family was still right there, with hugs and stories of God’s faithfulness in sickness and death and marriages falling apart.  And they still asked me to serve with them and to be stretched and to begin to learn – sometimes by trial and error – what the gifts are that God has given me to use in the Body.

Among the things I carry in my heart from all those church-plant years – things that make up the person I am today – the most profound is that I was noticed.  My heart still greets as family those dear people who saw me, and in doing so taught me that God is the God who sees me.  He sees me and he pursues me and he will not let me keep my comfortable distance, no matter how I act.

Now I am grown up and have come to love so many different church styles, but the sounds that will always be home for me are those of chairs scraping and stacked high after worship service, and the noisy clean-up shuffle of people tripping over one another to simultaneously greet newcomers and wind up power cords for the sound equipment.

Hearing these sounds today while sitting, later on, with Judah on another dusty, makeshift children’s church floor, an ocean away from the place I grew up, I hope that Judah and Amie’s church home – whether here at All People’s or somewhere else – is a place that they feel noticed.  I hope that, as they are surrounded by the hands and feet and smiles of Jesus, they learn that here is life abundant.