Reflections on Church

Sarah and I attended Denver Community Church last week and I was amazed at home at home it already felt.  We got there about 10 minutes before the service was supposed to start and were welcomed and told to choose any seat.  As we sat and waited, I noticed all the different types of people there.  There were college students, young adults, old adults, and some elderly people.  The service started singing some contemporary songs.  I hadn’t heard of a couple of the songs, but it was still cool to see everyone singing along and praising God.  There were a couple people with hand raised, but no one really shouting amen or anything like that. It was a lot like a mix between Open Bible and Prairie Lakes. As we finished singing, one of the associate pastors came up and talked to the congregation about human trafficking and a couple members of the congregation who had moved to Africa (I think) to combat the human trafficking.  After that, the main pastor came up and started his message.  He talked about confession (since it was the start of lent) and how we deal with confession and peoples responses to our confession. How does confession fight into our ‘flight or fight’ response?  Which resonates stronger inside of us?  Do we fight and not confess anything?  Or do we use the flight response and confess something?  How do people respond when we confess things to them?  Does their response change our habit of confessing?  What is the impact of all of these things on our life?   It got me thinking about what myself and others are focused on in life.  Are we focused on hiding, like Adam and Eve after eating, or are we focused on giving our lives to God?  The pastor talked about how God always follows through even when we don’t listen to him.  He will always be there when we need to confess and will be there when we don’t confess.  Everything in life starts and ends with understanding who we are and where we are in life.  In order to get there though, we have to start understanding who we are ourselves.  What are we hiding from others that we should be confessing?  For so long, I hid so much.  Yet now, I am able to ‘confess’ most of that.  Yet, is there still a hidden self when we confess?  Psalm 32 starts by saying, “Happy are those whose sins are forgiven…” And doesn’t it feel good when we confess stuff to people and they understand and are able to hold us and help us through it?  I found this song this week, well more it really stood out to me this week.  It’s called, Oh My Dear by Tenth Avenue North.  I thought about how much it describes my relationship with a couple of people, and it went pretty well with this sermon from church.

I cannot wait to attend church again at Denver Community Church.