Sunday mornings

When church service is over and everybody is mingling around afterwards it can feel like some of the most lonely times for me. Looking around for people to chat with and catch up with, but honestly those conversations are so superficial that it often feels like a waste of time. And then when the conversation about the weather and how your week was is over and you run out of other things to talk about they (or I) have to find some reason to excuse themselves from you and then you go off searching for another conversation. I’m not looking for deep intimate conversations every time I talk with someone on Sundays but after service seems to be one of the biggest social scenes in where I want to escape from the crowd.  It feels so lonely and I end up hiding behind my kids who are pulling me every which way and asking for this or that.
I feel like the older I’ve gotten the more introverted I get. I crave the smaller crowds and I don’t mind the silences and Sundays is just the total opposite of that for me. It’s like I need to be mingling and engaging in conversation that don’t last anymore than 10 minutes and then when the awkward silence comes it’s time to move on and find the next 5-10 minute conversation to hop into. Hopping around from conversation to conversation and then when we all get in the car and M asks me how it was talking with so and so, I really have nothing to say about it, because nothing was talked about that was worth mentioning.

I wonder if it’s also just a piling up of this church fatigue I’ve been feeling lately.  Or maybe after all these years at our church I’m still feeling a little disconnected from the families and I need to make a little more effort. Or maybe I’m so focused on my church and how I feel about it  and how it all affects me but not really about Christ.  Maybe I just need a refocus and a recharge of my relationship with Christ.  Or maybe…

Whatever the case, Sunday mornings are pretty damn lonely.

A day of rest

It is Sunday morning and normally I would be at church with my family but this morning my husband took the kids to church and let me stay at home. It has been a long and busy week for all of us. We’ve had multiple guests come and stay with us, Mike has been crunching long hours to hit a deadline early next week, parent teacher conference and Halloween.
I knew it was off to a bad morning when I just had no patience for the kids, got into an argument with M, and we didn’t have anymore coffee at home. I tend to bottle up my exhaustion (which is what I think most moms do) and just carry on until I’ve reached my threshold and am unnecessarily snappy and impatient and just need a good cry to regain control of myself and my life. (Blogging helps too!)
So instead of being at church, I walked to my local Trader Joe’s and picked up some coffee and am back in bed listening to some music on Spotify, reading some devotions, and blogging.
M and I were able to resolve our argument this morning and I am so thankful for a husband who forgives me when I am moody and not nice, is not legalistic about me having to be at church every Sunday and truly understands when I just need a little time to myself to rest and be renewed.

Friendships

In recent months I have really been thinking a lot about my friendships here in LA and how much I yearn for constancy in my friendships and to fit in somewhere. Our church is somehow very segregated in our family groups and the singles groups. Several years back M and I felt like we really wanted to bridge that gap of not knowing very many single people in our church and were very intent on getting more involved in things other than the families ministry. It is now a few years later and I feel like we are straddling these two groups but not quite having that deeper community of friends in either group. Our church is also a fairly transient church and so a lot of the old friends and families we were close with are no longer there.

I often think back to my childhood in DE and the 5-6 families we saw every Friday night gather at our house for bible study and how these friendships with the parents and the kids were so tightly knit together. We were all great friends and it was a very intimate community of families that would always gather for all the major holidays and go on trips together. Now that I am a parent I find myself really wanting that not only for my kids but for myself as well. We have pockets of friends from our years here in LA and they are great friends but I guess what I miss is the set of constant, stable, steady friends and families that will hang out together after meetings and bible studies are over and see what’s going on on the weekends and plan camping trips together. I sometimes wonder if this happens more easily in suburbia and it makes me lean towards moving to an area where the people are less transient, the air feels cleaner, and the parking lots are spacious.

While I don’t think wanting a community of families and deeper friendships is bad in it of itself I feel that God has been teaching me that it is too much of an obsession of mine. Of wanting all the comforts and luxuries of a Pleasantville life. I’ve been so focused on me and what I want and coveting all these things that I am losing some perspective on who God is in my life. I’ve been trying to do a personal study on getting back to the basics of who God is and my fear of man but to be honest it is going nowhere. But despite it all He has been showing me that my time here in LA and the relationships we have made has not been wasted. We have been a blessing to others and we have most certainly been blessed by them as well.

And as I crawl out of my introverted shell and take intiative in striking up new friendships and reconnecting with old I know God is working in my life and giving me a new perspective that this life is not about me but about Him.