Photo by John Price on Unsplash
Three things over the weekend brought into relief why my relationship with church can sometimes feel conflicted; swinging from the deeply emotive to the somewhat irritating over the course of a few days.
First off was a truly immersive worship experience on Sunday morning, one in which the songs seemed God-sent especially for me, particularly Jaye Thomas’We Wait For You which is one of my favourites. Off the back of that, I went home and binged on worship music on Spotify.
That spiritual high was then followed by a particularly emotional farewell for U, whose sojourn in the ‘Deen has come to an end. On a personal level, I owe my radio debut to her. Beyond that, she brought a lot of energy to worship whenever she led the team at church, and in the conversations we had - far too few and far between in retrospect - she demonstrated an impressive ability to deconstruct thorny subjects into their constituent parts and develop reasoned arguments. She will be missed - the tears and long faces members of the teams she served with in church are a testament to that. I for one wish her the best wishes in her new sojourn.
From the highs of these two came the downer, a conversation at an evening gathering where the subject of weight came up. That the person who was the subject of the conversation was clearly uncomfortable and unwilling to continue counted for little as one of the members of the group persisted in hammering out that point - of increased weight. That the majority of folk at the evening event were Nigerian counts, I suspect - we have a penchant for lacking tact - but I guess that the opportunity to have that conversation came about because of the perceived relationship, which attending the same church engendered.
I suppose on the balance of probabilities, one little niggle is less important than all the other positives?