Some people may have experienced idyllic childhoods. Mine had moments — long moments, actually. I have so many good memories of adventures, misadventures, and love.
But our family faced a significant challenge. We didn’t know it, but we’d be needing a church to help us get through a crisis that could have destroyed us all.
We attended a church in Brampton. When I drive by the building now, I’m surprised by how small it seems. We spent hours there — Sunday morning in a cinderblock room in the basement and then the morning and evening services, followed by one or two meetings during the week. We got to know all kinds of people, people who loved God sincerely and loved us well.
You could write a novel about them. They were characters, every one of them. They were glorious. They were real. They were anything but boring.
If I were to pick a church to help us through the crisis of our lives, I don’t think I would have picked this one. It was too small. They were conservative. I might have guessed that we’d face whispers and sideway looks when our problems became known to them.
I’m glad I wasn’t on the selection committee, because I couldn’t have picked a better church. The pastor gave our family godly counsel. All kinds of people gave us practical help. They never offered help in a way that robbed us of our dignity or communicated disapproval. They helped us in ways that made it seem like they felt like we were giving them a gift of being allowed to serve us when we needed it most.
I can’t count all the ways that this little church loved us. This period in our lives gave me a love for the church, an appreciation for what the church is called to be, and an awareness that the call to love within the church is not an idealistic dream but a reality that many of us get to experience without being fully aware of how rare and beautiful it is.
I love the church — not the church of my dreams, not the perfect church, but the real, gritty church full of people who are struggling through their own sanctification, who show up tired most weeks, but who keep loving and keep serving. I love the work of the Holy Spirit, who somehow takes the most ordinary groups of people and uses them in ways that could never be explained apart from his empowering grace.
I love how many times I’ve seen the same story repeat itself. A group of ragtag saints come together in worship and service, and they become more together than what anyone could explain if we left the Holy Spirit out of the occasion. I’m not surprised by how rarely this happens. I’m amazed by how regularly it happens all around us if we just had eyes to see it.
Like the carpenter who builds priceless furniture out of driftwood, God builds a dwelling place out of the broken and unremarkable. We get to be part of it. We get to see what God does through the most unlikely people, and it’s a glorious thing to watch.