The Angel & I spent last weekend’s holiday at a Labor Day party/picnic/bocce ball tournament. The food and company were excellent, we lost both of our games badly, and I got to spend some time with my family. The soundtrack for this sacred time was a best of the ‘80’s playlist. During the Sugar Hill Gang’s classic hit “Rapper’s Delight,” I watched my cousins sitting next to each other across the yard. They weren’t talking, they were just moving individually, in perfect time (with the music and each other), and mouthing every word (which is really saying something, “Rapper’s Delight” is very, very long). This continued for quite a while, covering quite a few songs.

My family hasn’t always been this close, there was a too-many-year period where we were estranged. We used to live next door to each other, then we moved, things happened, grudges & resentments happened, distance happened, then another thing happened, that distance didn’t matter anymore and we were reconciled. As I watched them, I thought of all that. I thought of my sister, and the language that close relationships have that transcends language and time. I thought of us and how much we all missed, and how much we still miss, deciding some sort of thing or another was more important than this.

So, then, I started to think about the relationships we share, and the reasons they end (or are placed on pause). I wonder if we even remember the reasons. We remember the times we spent, the fun we had, the memories we made, together, but we usually have a much harder time remembering the nonsense that keeps us apart.

We’ve taken to reading the “love chapter” in 1st Corinthians 13 every Sunday. Love is patient and kind and doesn’t keep any record of wrongs and never fails. Do these characteristics describe each of our interactions & conversations, do they even describe our homes and/or marriages?? I said earlier that the holiday was a “sacred time,” and the worship music was “Rapper’s Delight,” and that was true. Every time love becomes the cause and the effect, the motivation and the result, of our lives, God is the main character, and we may as well call those spaces church. Every time our love asks us to lay our own interests, vanity, control, and need to win, down, and we respond by doing just that, it is absolutely church. When we hold each other, listen, laugh, play, cry, these things are all church, and wherever they happen is the temple of God. 

I’ve been in churches full of bitterness and unforgiveness and I’ve been in bars and gyms full of support, encouragement and capital L love. Monday, that yard was a temple, a monument to the God who made us and sustains us.

You know what else I thought? That we live in a world (comprised of millions of homes, streets, neighborhoods, communities, districts, states, countries, planets, and galaxies) in desperate need of the message of Jesus, the love of Jesus, the Gospel of Jesus. And we need to be the so-called (for lack of a better term) “brand ambassadors,” of the Gospel. We need to sing & dance along to this divine Story, over and over again, being living examples of possibility instead of clinging to our own little stories.

I realize that this, of course, doesn’t come easy (and spiritual attack is, sadly, very real), and can be quite painful, but that is also part of the Story we happen to be in. That’s why we simply can’t continue to miss the most beautiful, inspiring parts just because we’ve chosen to be somewhere else, divided by who cares what. These are our lives and we are our people, church is anywhere & everywhere, “Rapper’s Delight” is awesome, and I am truly grateful for (or in) all of it.