speak

The images in this post are of a beautiful cemetery that I stumbled onto during our latest trip to Texas. I made a wrong turn at the grocery store and was so glad I did…

This is not so much a flashback to sometime last year as it is to sometime in the last couple of weeks. But, since I obviously haven’t taken the posting every day part of the rules very seriously either, I think I’m okay with a minor infraction here as well.

A couple of weeks ago found me at a wedding and a funeral in the span of just a few days. And frankly, I was amazed at how different they were.

I guess I should clarify: I was not surprised that they were different, but in how they were different.

At the wedding, the pastor shared some thoughts on commitment and faith. On behalf of the couple, he said. He spoke of marriage as a covenant, of depending on God for the strength to uphold it. All true things.

And then he said: For those of you here today who have broken that covenant – and it was with great difficulty that I made myself hear his next few words. My head filled with a buzz. All I could think was why on earth would you say that?

He went on to say that he wanted those people to know that God was always there, would always forgive. Again, true. But my heart was caught in my chest. Some of it was the way in which it was said – reading those words now on this screen, they don’t seem to sting the way they did that night. Sitting there, I went round and round in my head while he went on through a few more statements with the same sentiment.

And I ached inside.

You could write it off as my own baggage. My job is to help my church communicate, in many different ways. Most definitely including what and how things are said from the front. On top of that, both Bryan and I come from families that were affected by divorce. I have dear friends – who doesn’t? – who come from similar situations. Who are, themselves, divorced. So, maybe I’m oversensitive. But I don’t think so.

I think that if that comment stung me so – and I have been married to one person for 17 years now – how hard would the blow be if I hadn’t?

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And then, the funeral. A difficult one. A life that was broken, and now ended. There was pain everywhere you looked.

And yet the funeral was a thing of joy. The words that were spoken were honest, not just true. They did not deny any of the mistakes or heartache, but they were a balm. I watched as a woman spoke to her nieces of their mother’s love for them, just in case the mother didn’t take the chance to say it herself. I listened as a pastor reminded us that ‘the greatest of these is love,’ and then reminded us of her love.

No one glossed over anything. They simply held up the pieces of her life and somehow allowed us to see the Father’s love shining through them, making them beautiful.

I know that many people will come inside a church for a wedding or a funeral who won’t come at any other time. I know that when people hear words spoken by a single person in the front of a church, those words are often given the weight of an entire faith. And it is just so precious, the chance to speak into a life some love and grace and yes, truth.

What I want to say to that pastor at the wedding is: Don’t mess that up. But we all mess up; who knows what all was really going on that day. It makes me all the more grateful for when I see that chance handled with great care; it makes me all the more sure that that’s how I want to be too.