Communion

Connecting with God has looked a bit different for me the last few months. Some things have stayed the same; weekly times to journal have been vital in terms of self-reflection and talking to God, while daily prayer times tend to be more terse (this has been my spiritual rhythm since the advent of my kids). The overall feel, though, very much has been that I'm going through "the valley of the shadow of death", and in that place, God is present but not necessarily immediately seen or felt. I know He's with me, but in the same way you might know the road ahead of you is there as you drive through fog.

The one time each week the fog seems to lift has been during communion on Sunday mornings. At our church, communion is sort of a free-for-all; any time during the last set of worship, people can go by themselves or in pairs to take communion and go pray. Pretty much every Sunday morning in the last 3 1/2 months, I've spent that whole time of worship kneeling in front of a cross in our church, praying and crying. For some reason, that time of prayer is when I'm able to connect most directly with God. It's been a combination of mourning, being angry, asking questions, and hearing back from the Lord about what's been going on for me.

It's also been a fairly solitary experience, some of which has been hard for me as Midi's death has brought up a deep loneliness for me. But some of that seems appropriate, too. I need to hear what God wants to say to me, not what someone else thinks. And as I read today in Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament for a Son, "Each person's suffering has its own quality. No outsider can fully enter into it." Those times of communion have been a sacred time for God and I to connect, for him to meet me in my suffering in a way that probably no one else ever could.