What Were You Expecting?

It is not unusual to catch myself grumbling about something.

Not that I love a good grumble, you understand.  Most of the time I’m busy thinking about something, or smiling about something or laughing about something and some cases actually doing something!  Yet there are those occasions in conversation, where after a while I discover that the stuff coming about of my mouth is a moan.

Quite often those grumble times are about a church service.  Maybe I didn’t ‘feel’ the Spirit.  Perhaps the sermon was boring.  Maybe there was too much hype around the singing, with little else to go after it.  Whatever the issue, I’ll be reviewing it like it’s a duff film I just watched on Netflix.  (A duff film like Walking Tall starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.  He’s a decent action star, but it is a duff film.)

I was challenged about that again recently.  After another little grumble, my longsuffering conversant companion asked me this question,

“What were you expecting?”

It made me stop and think.  Maybe my expectations were unrealistic and perhaps ungodly.  Maybe my focus was on the wrong thing.  Like others I could have been expecting the ‘preacher’ to bring in the bacon with regard to the purpose of showing up.  Perhaps I was expecting those singers at the front to deliver the goods as another critical factor in being there in the first place.

It occurred to me that indeed my focus was in the wrong place completely.  Reading scripture again, and reminding myself of the purpose of church and all that it became evident again that indeed I have something to offer.  I have something to give.  It is fine having expectations, but those should be based around opportunities to receive and give edification through any member of the Body God chooses to use.

That may not be the sermon or the songs.  That may not be by the folks ‘up front’.  That might very well be in the chat you have the brother next to you in the breaks.  It could be in the meals that you have after the session.  It could be the lovely little road trips that make up the journeys to and from the service.  It could even be that little interchange you have with your colleague in the cubicle next to you in the toilet!

I grow increasingly tired of communal engagements that don’t give space for the members of the community to genuinely engage and share what God has given them.  Yet despite structures not providing those opportunities overtly, it is about making the most of whatever opportunities present themselves.  It’s about changing expectations – it’s about remembering the same God in charge of all life, is as much in your little interactions, as he is in the formatted main events.

It is changing those expectations that inevitably changed my experiences of church services, so that even the most mundane session with the music off and the sermon being good in exercising the fruit of patience, much can be gained.  After all, what else was I expecting?

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden