I love my church. I just want to make that absolutely clear. I really love it. For someone who professes to love his church, I do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time being snide about it, but I honestly do love it. This morning, I was reminded why.
As part of this morning's service, we took communion. Now, I don't usually expect to experience God through our morning services. That probably sounds terrible, but when you consider that I'm always thinking through what I'm going to teach the youth group that morning, often I have to give a notice or lead prayers, I almost always have half a dozen people I need to talk to afterwards, and I'm not a morning person at the best of times, you can imagine why I find it difficult to concentrate on worshipping God. But this morning, God took me completely by surprise.
I was serving the bread and wine with Jo. The faithful arose and shuffled forward to meet us. The first person in the queue arrived.
"The body of Jesus, broken for you," I intoned. He tore off a small piece of bread, put it in his mouth, and moved on. Next.
"The body of Jesus, broken for you."
At around this point I glanced at the queue that was forming. Hmmm... there's rather a lot of you, isn't there? Rather a lot of people Jesus' body was broken for... Oh... I started to get the point. They kept on coming, one after another. Almost all people I knew, mostly people I knew well, and for every last one of them, "The body of Jesus, broken for you". Not just broken for us as a group, but for each one of us as individuals. The line continued; teenagers, mothers with small children, pensioners, people with struggles, people with problems, people with huge problems. And Jesus' body was broken for every last one of them. He loves every last one of them.
By the time I'd served the last person in the line, it was all I could do to avoid blubbing. In a way I really wasn't expecting, and at a time I really wasn't expecting, God reminded me why I bother. He really does love the church. I love it too.