Give me Sunday!
It’s been a while since I’ve done any writing and I’ve been storing a blog post in my head for awhile. We had our second conference call about 6 weeks ago and the nature of our call was to discuss different ways that we guard our lives. We talked about everything from guarding our time to guarding our families to guarding our money.
As we worked through this topic we came to a point where we were talking about how even Sunday morning worship services can be something we need to guard. The crux of the conversation was that often our presence at worship services can quickly turn into work hours and doing business. Take for example the student or parent who approaches you and starts asking you a series of questions about an upcoming event. Now maybe when that happens just every once in a while it’s not a big deal, but what if that happened constantly?
The result would be that we were robbed of our time of worship. I remember once being in church praying while the pastor prayed and I had my eyes closed and head down and this student came up to me during the worship service and wanted to ask me 20 questions about a ski trip we were doing. I remember trying to ignore them hoping that they caught me praying, but they either didn’t or they thought that what they wanted to know was more important.
Now maybe that isn’t how things are for you but my hope for my time on Sunday mornings is that I’m talking to people about life and spiritual things, making new friends, and worshipping just like anyone else. That’s tough to do when you’re on staff at a church.
I’ll encourage you to find your time, to guard it (not legalistically sounds very wise), to maximize your worship time, to share your lives with others, and to even answer questions from the kid who taps on your shoulder while you’re praying.
Rev. Mark Johannesen is pastor at Word of Life Lutheran Brethren Church in LeSueur, Minnesota.