Church at My House

I did not sleep well last night and decided to stay home from church this morning. I wanted to listen to a sermon or two online, but when the website timed out on me, I decided to check out my personal library of sermons. I ended up listening to a sermon I preached during our last semester at LSU. Aside from noticing again, as I do every time I listen to myself in recordings, that I have a much stronger country accent than I realize in daily life... that I sound very much like a combination of my friends Angie and Tara when I preach... and that I need to get control of my use of the word ummmmm... I had a few thoughts I wanted to put down in writing before they fly away (apparently another symptom of pregnancy).

"If we do not experience God, we cannot experience love."

If this statement is true, and I believe it is, the opposite is also true. As we experience God, we experience love. And not just in our relationships with Him. We know (and for some of us, learn) how to identify love in our lives by the interactions and exchanges we have with the Lord. Without God, we continually misinterpret life situations and the actions of others. But as we know God and live with Him, we learn to correctly name love in our interpersonal relationships as well.


One of the interesting things about consistent pubic speaking is the inability to separate a particular sermon from a specific season of life. This effect is magnified when the sermons are recorded. As I sat and listened to myself speaking to my LSU students, I could see our old room in the Design Building like it was yesterday. I could feel the heat of the stage lights on my face. I remember what it felt like to step in that tiny little space upfront and try to speak to a group you couldn't even see for those blinding lights. And more than all that, I remember how I felt, not just as a director/pastor/preacher, but as a human, a daughter, a wife, a friend, at that time in my life. For me, it wasn't pretty. No one probably knew at that point, but that sermon was straight out of my own life and relationship with God at that moment. But most people don't think of their pastors/preachers as being real people with real challenges and real hurts. But such was the state of my heart as I took the mic that night. I was in the midst of some real life challenges - and, completely unknown to me at that moment, I was about to enter one of the most difficult, heart-breaking, life-changing experiences of my life. I talk in the sermon about friends who have betrayed us in the past - I was about to be betrayed. I talk about the moments when you feel most alone - I was about to find myself absolutely alone. So as I listened to myself speak, it was like knowing both the beginning and the end of the story, like watching a character in a movie you've already seen - wanting to tell them not to open that door cuz the crazy ax-murderer is behind it, but you know they will anyway. And for the first time, as I "watched" myself for 43 minutes and 38 seconds, all I could see was God. Usually, when I replay that time in my life I am focused on what I could have done differently or how I felt during that process. Today I saw God. I saw Him speaking to me in small ways. I saw Him setting the stage long beforehand to prepare me for the most difficult act of my life thus far. Wow, He is so good to me.