By Kyle McIntosh
My family attended FPC when I was little, I remember sitting in the comfy pews, gazing over the exhilarating balcony, and most importantly, looking down on the epic below-the-surface playground. Whenever I saw it, I imagined it to be a sanctuary free from adults: where kids can be whatever they want to be.
For reasons hardly known to me at the time, we moved churches (I now know it was mostly because we wanted to go somewhere close to our house). Fortunately, I was so little at the time that I did not really care where I went: I just went. Now after many years of supposedly growing older and wiser, I find myself longing for the same trust I used to have: the trust to just follow.
A year ago, I did not attend church for a month. The church plant I had been a part of for the past year and a half had decided to split in all the ways. It was a weird feeling: kind of like a breakup, but mostly just quiet one the inside. Of all the churches I had been to, that one had made the most sense. After a month of isolation from church (church-solation is the correct terminology), it was time to surgically be reattached to the body of Christ. Unfortunately, church seeking these days can be awkward and uncomfortable, leaving one feeling more like the church is reluctantly injecting you into the bloodstream rather than welcoming you in as a long lost vital cell. For me though, I had a good experience of it; in fact, I stayed at the first church I set foot in.
Upon visiting what would be my place of residence for the next ten months, I figured what better place to go to church than right across the street. Though I cautiously walked in, FPC was not cautious about welcoming me in. Before I could think, I had already had two dinner meet-and-greets paid for me, and I was on the worship team. It felt it many ways like an old-school Acts kind of hospitality: the good kind. Even despite this initial onslaught on kindness, I have to confess that I would not have really known community here if I were not on the worship team. From morning coffee to praying together before service, from jamming at worship practices during the week to playing together Sunday morning, I learned in a new way what togetherness in Christ is.
I do not think God intended for us to leave behind our childish ways. Yes, He wants us to put away our youthful passions, but He calls us to become like children in order that we will enter into His kingdom. For even as our bodies grow older, He decides to renew the Spirit inside us each day. And why would He take the time every day to do that if He wanted us to feel as dry as I did when I was in-between churches? I believe that certain seasons happen, ones that seem to drag on for an eternity. Yet I believe that is only because they are building up to an eternity, and a musical buildup of that magnitude does not simply happen in sixteen measures like it does Sunday morning.
Being at FPC has taught me that God is always looking to restore us; sometimes that process takes longer than we can handle, but with Him we can bear it. That just as the underground playground at FPC cannot be seen even from the street, those who have seen it knows what it brings. How it all at once fuels our creativity energy, refreshes our weary spirits, gives us a place to connect, and finally, leaves us with something worth sharing with the world. It is a place of true life: where people can feel human again. For it is only when we give ourselves fully over to God that He can remind us what it means to be fully human. For these reminders and more, I am glad that I have made my way back to FPC.
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