I'm getting too good at typing with one hand ... as I still can't move my left arm.
I couldn't rouse the boys this morning for church so I found an evening service in Howell. It was a teen service, so-called, before their youth group meeting. Tim, as usual, led us to the first pew. I'm always afraid, at an unfamiliar church, of taking someone else's seat.
A young man played guitar and by the end of the service, Kenny was tapping his hands on the pew rail in front of us. Like he was playing the drums, he later told me. Sitting so close, it was hard to not "people watch," especially as I had done it all before earlier in the day. There's at least one altar server on his way to holy orders, tucking his worn black missal under a side chair.
Despite the guitar and praise music on overhead projector, it wasn't a low mass by any means. The priest, an Indian, was terribly reverent, even purifying the vessels afterwards which, even though it's the rule now, we don't see at our church.
After the entrance hymn, "Here I Am, Lord," we sang Chris Tomlin's "How Great Is Our God" for the offertory, most of which I missed because I had to take Tim to the restroom. But I do actually know that song, so I was singing it in the vestibule.1 The communion hymn was "Hungry (Falling On My Knees)" which I struggled with because it epitomizes the real absence of evangelical communion. It didn't fit.
The recessional hymn was "Here I Am to Worship" which sounds like a gathering hymn. IOW, like the communion hymn, it sounded out of place.
I'm wondering whether Kenny will request that we attend that late, teen service again.
1 The church, like so many, is undergoing a renovation but I think I was in the vestibule.
cf. Teens embrace the present at youth conference - The Monitor, 3/16/09.
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