Save me from my contempt for the things that make me strong
Save me from any value I could put a price tag on…
–Rich Mullins, “Save Me“

Almost a year ago today, on my old web site, I wrote a post entitled “Why I walked out of church.” This post set off a bit of a fire in the Christian blogosphere, as well as leaving me inundated with emails and reactions ranging to all extremes. Bloggers wrote positively and negatively about what I said, with some of the posts and reader responses delving into personal judgments on who I was. At the time, I tried (foolishly) to respond to everyone and put out fires, inadvertently starting new ones, until I finally gave up and let all the argument and heated talk die out. However, I still, to this day, get an email here and there about the post.

I didn’t carry that post over to this new site.

The basic meaning of what I was trying to say then has not changed for me, but things in my life have happened that have whittled down the sharp edges and made me less interested in using words to cut as I did when I wrote that post. The tone was wild, the words blunt; if I wrote it today, it would be quite different. It would be shorter. I would talk about love. It was what it was at the time, but I am a very changed person now and couldn’t really bear to have that to carried around with me on this new blog and so I left it behind, figuring it was dead for good.

Mickey McLean, of World Magazine Online, had featured the blog post in his column back during the original furor. He emailed me today to tell me that Tullian Tchividjian had excerpted part of the blog post in his new book, Unfashionable. He was made aware of it through the Breakpoint.org site which carried its own excerpt of the book.

I’m not sure what I think about having my words extended even further to people, this time in a book. They are old words. They are words in a book about “the church” in general, the kind of book I used to eat up and fill my bookshelves with and now let the dust pile on as I grow tired of the filter of other believer’s voices addressing things that don’t seem at all important to me now. They are words that beget the kind of infectious theological argument that permeates the blogosphere and damages fragile beliefs that I am trying to have faith in.

I’ve not read Tchividjian’s book.

It is, in fact, with a kind of sadness, that I consider the state I was in one year ago when I wrote that post, and where I am today, another Sunday in which I, for a short while, went back to attending that church I wrote about walking out of. My feelings are still the same. I struggle with the same dislikes and repulsion I feel about some of the things I addressed. It all just seems so secondary in the light of right now.

Right now?

I had to find a church; I very much needed a church, a place to worship and hear God’s word and be around — even if not really part of — other believers. I had moved to a new city where I didn’t know anyone, and wasn’t going back to the church I grew up in. This is where I am now, for better or for worse.

I ended up back at the church I wrote so scathingly about in that blog post after trying different churches; now I find myself sitting in the back pew, sometimes purposefully arriving late to miss out on some of the pre-service announcements and things that I don’t care for, sometimes just wanting to hide because I am not at all outgoing and mainly just want to slip in and slip out. I find myself still missing the connections I tried to talk about in the original post. I find myself periodically growing irritated with the same aspects, but not having the desire to let that grow into anything worth haranguing about. It’s a church and the Bible is preached and I can worship, and that’s no small thing.

Yet, today, a Sunday in which I was desperately wanting someone to pray for me, I found myself standing back at my pew, the service dismissed and the altars empty after a brief large-group altar call, everyone chatting and going on about the day as they headed for the doors. I was crying, though hiding it behind my hair. I’d been crying just about non-stop from when I walked in the door.

Have you ever prayed that someone would come and pray with you?

But the church is big and there were people all around the pastor and you just don’t walk up to a pastor in a big church when you’re a back pew attendee and so I ended up leaving after standing like a fool for an inordinate amount of time wondering how I could find someone to pray for me, what the procedure was in a big church where I didn’t know anyone. I am a shy person.

A year ago, maybe, I would have come home and written another angry blog post about it, but right now, I mainly just want someone to pray for me. I looked in the bulletin and found they didn’t have Sunday evening service tonight. I looked at another church I’d attended and they didn’t have one tonight, either, though on other Sunday evenings they alternated between youth activities and various groups. In fact, I found myself in the odd position of wanting church and prayer and coming up empty.

A friend sent me an email several weeks ago. “You seem quieter, more sober these days.  It’s interesting to observe,” she said, in relation to my blog. Since mid-May, I would guess, there has been the noticeable change that she is referring to. I’m not sure I find it all that interesting and had been hoping it hadn’t been observed. I’ve mainly been expending energy to keep everything in check and good on the surface so I could function and go to work and get paid and handle day-to-day business and get through the day and blog within reasonable limits about lighthearted things without letting on. Guess I didn’t pull it off, entirely. Today, though, I very much wanted someone — an actual other human being — to pray with me.

I don’t feel angry. Anger has left the building, so to speak, over the past months. There’s no room for it anymore; when you feel crushed a lot of stuff just leaks out and evaporates away; anger is one of many. So I’m not angry, and certainly not about church. I mainly find myself sitting in silence in my apartment wondering what next. Numbness. Preparing to reacquaint myself with impending alone-ness, making “to-do” lists so that I might be busy and not dwell on the reality. Next Sunday, and the next, and the next, I’ll go to church anyway.

Rich Mullins,  in his song “Save Me“, said what I was trying to express in that blog post a year ago in a more succint and honest way; he said everything I was trying to say in frustration, touching on contempt and fear of how God changes and makes us strong, politicizing religion, cheapening the gospel, and shallow attractions, all wrapped up in the core prayer we all really want to pray if we could get past pride and anger and distraction: Save me.

Whether I’m walking in or out of church, or just down the path I’ve been told to follow, right now all I can pray is simply that: Save me. Please, just save me.

I don’t know what else to say today.