A reunion, of sorts

Tonight I went to Bible study.  It was an anniversary or reunion of sorts.  I'm not really sure which.  Two years ago, this was the first Bible study I'd ever gone to.  This was the Bible study where I ended up bearing my soul and crying to a complete stranger who ended up becoming a friend.  And it was the Bible study that helped shore me up at a time when I just wasn't sure what I needed to be doing with my life.

When I sat there tonight, I thought back to that first night.  There I was in a Baptist church, a denomination whose doors I thought I'd never darken again.  I was the youngest woman there, sitting among a group of sweet older ladies, the kind of ladies who make those church lady cookies that I love so much.  "El Shaddai" was playing, and I seriously considered bolting, as I thought about how completely out of place I was at this Bible study, in this Baptist church, among these sweet, older ladies who went to church every Sunday and looked so angelic.  I mean, I kind of felt like a fake.  I wasn't one of them.  I was just this girl who needed somewhere to go.  And, there I was, in the last place on earth I ever thought I'd be.

Tonight I didn't feel so out of place, didn't feel like a fake.  I don't even think I was the youngest person there, though I still enjoyed one of those delicious cookies.  Older church ladies are so good at those.  But, I kept thinking, maybe more like wondering what it was that brought me there, what it was that made me keep coming back when there was nothing at that Bible study that I could really relate to.  I mean, the enthusiastic people so excited about God?  The contemporary Christian music (that was actually no longer contemporary)?  None of it looked like me, sounded like me.

But, then I remembered Isaiah 53.  I memorized it in school when I was a kid.  It's beautiful and haunting.  It tells of a Christ who is to come, the same Jesus that we don't even get to meet until the Gospels.  I that chapter, there is a part of a verse, "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."  It's talking about Jesus, saying that there was nothing to draw us to Him.  Except that everything was there.  Is there.  Hope and love and salvation and goodness.  Those things that we crave and need.  They were all there, even though we couldn't see it because we didn't look past the surface.

But, maybe we knew.  Maybe there was a still, small voice telling us that, though we could not see all of that goodness, it was there.

I love you,

Sara