Renewed
I spent the first Sunday morning of the new year in church. Well, sort of. I was an hour late.
Last year my life was like plain porridge -- slightly greyish, gooey, sticky and not very appetizing-looking. I didn't have set schedules for anything and mostly drifted from day to day, especially when I was depressed.
Now that my life has some sort of structure again (a 9-to-5:30 job will do that to you), I've decided I can stretch my structure a bit and plonk church into it. Coz I'm already waking up in time to get to work at 9am. If I can do that, then I can wake up and get to church at 10am. I don't know how to explain it... if you wake up late every day, then waking up early on Sunday seems too hard. But if you wake up early every day (not TOO early, though), then waking up early on Sunday also just seems like part of life. Am I making sense here?
Sherman once said to me that it's about having the "damn discipline" to go to church. Maintaining structures takes discipline, and usually that's pretty hard for me, but this time round it's getting easier. Maybe because I actually want to put some structures in place. I don't function well when I don't have any sort of structures around me at all.
The other thing is, more than becoming something I can do, going to church is starting to become something I want to do. For myself. Not for God.
That sounds kinda weird, in a way. But I guess one can't keep doing stuff for other people and trying to perform to others' -- or even one's own -- expectations. I hope to go to church because I want to be there and not because I think God wants me to be there. It's not the same kind of 'wanting to be there' which I used to have; church service is no longer something that I eagerly look forward to and anticpate each week. No, this 'wanting to be there' is a quiet kind of affirmation inside my heart when I enter the church building on Sunday morning that this is the right place to be in and it is fitting that I am here. There is a sense of things falling into place.