Sunday Morning Strange

It's Sunday morning and I'm not in church and I'm not on vacation. I'm at home. Over a lifetime of church leadership and ministry, my Sunday mornings planned themselves. The plan included me, my wife, and my children too. We all knew what to do on Sunday morning: go to church. But today is different than any Sunday I can remember.

Today, Robin is working at the hospital, Jeanne Ann is away at summer camp and it's just the Taits at home with me and Matthew. Tonight, I'll be leading a training that includes a prayer meeting and teaching / discussion time. But as this Sunday morning came and went, I was at home instead of sitting in a worship service in somebody else's church.

What, I suddenly wonder, do my neighbors (the non-churchgoing majority) do with their Sunday mornings anyway? Funny -- I haven't had a thought like that in years. I start to silently scheme about what I could do to open my home to my neighbors on a given Sunday. Should I hold an open house pancake breakfast like the Bagley's? A free car wash? Take a prayer walk with my eyes wide-open? How can I become a part of my neighbor's lives and routine after hoping for years that they would become a part of mine?

How weird to think of Sunday as just another day. For so long, it has been THE BIG DAY (the one I spent all week preparing for). But today, as I reflect on what Sunday represents to my unchurched neighbors, I find myself considering that Sundays may be the day that some of them dread most. Witness the following Kris Kristofferson lyrics:

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:Sunday mornin' comin' down.

For the first time in a long, long time I'm thinking about my neighbors (instead of myself or my congregation) on a Sunday morning. And it's strange -- and, somehow, right.
--Bill Faris