Dancing With Conflict

This week we have many opportunities to fellowship and worship together. As we prepare to enter these holy experiences together, I want to share with you sort of a Paul Harvey "The Rest of the Story" story. You see, the events that led up to bringing you this week's worship offerings have been as much of a gift as I anticipate the services themselves will be. Here's the rest of the story:

The week before Holy Week, the MCC Austin Sunday Worship Team met for our weekly meeting. About a dozen of us squeezed around tables in a local deli, indulged in soup or sandwiches or decadent desserts, tried to filter out the clink and clatter from the counter, and tried to turn down the volume of nearby guests, some of whom practice their Spanish lessons with great volume and gusto each Monday evening.

The Sunday Worship Team is made up of roughly 15 people, and it represents a pretty wide swath of the congregation. We have members whose creativity and imagination skip merrily off the charts, members whose knack for analysis and deductive skills would shame Sherlock Holmes, and members who fill in nicely the whole spectrum in between. Each member of the team is passionate, amazingly articulate even if not especially verbal, and almost all fill leadership roles in their families, work places, or at our church. Considering our strength and diversity, we never should have been surprised by what happened next, but we were.

On that Monday before Holy Week, we had a rather unexpected visitor show up at our meeting: Conflict.

What on earth was Conflict doing there? We hadn't invited him. She isn't a member or regular attender of our church as far as any of us know. And besides, isn't Church the last place that Conflict would feel welcome, or wanted, or fed???

I'm embarrassed to say we politely ignored Conflict for a while, kind of like we would an elephant in the room. But then we threw caution to the wind and invited him to dance on the table! Right there in the midst of us! Right there in public!

Oh, and she kept dancing...even when the rest of us went home.

I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about her dancing there.... In one way, she was pitiful and all alone, just dancing there with no one wanting to join her. And yet, in another way, she danced with us all...wouldn't stop beckoning and cajoling and insisting we be her partner...would not be, and never will be, ignored.

I don't know how each member of the team interpreted this dance, but I know that for me the interpretation continued to be one of great sadness. From my perception, our imaginations were stymied. Our appreciation for each other and free flow of ideas and actions were all gunked up. We were broken. I couldn't fix us. I felt small and useless.

I did the only thing I felt like doing. I cried. Then I did the only thing I thought could help. I prayed. Sometimes I used words; sometimes I didn't. Many of my prayers were like great big fill in the blank tests-with most of the blanks empty.

And then, finally, another visitor appeared. This one longed for and very much welcomed: The Lord of the Dance. The Lord of the Dance who danced at Bethlehem, at Cana, on the mountaintops, on the water. The one who dares us to remember:

They cut me down and I leapt up high
I am the life that will never, never die
I'll live in you if you'll live in me
I am the Lord of the dance, said he.

I don't know if any of this matters to you, but for me, I have had the blessing of an early Easter. For several days I had felt confined to a dark tomb, and then the Light of the World burst in and my hope and my heart were resurrected again. The Lord of the Dance wanted to dance with me! And not just with me, of course, but with all of us who had been hurting all week.

A week after Conflict surprised us all, our team met again. This time, we had a chair waiting for Conflict, and of course, he was there, but looking a little smaller and less sure of himself than he had been the week before. I think she was taken aback to find that not only had each of us found during the course of the week a certain comfort with having her present, but we were expecting her. We saved a chair for her. Yes, Conflict took his place right there along with Kindness, Compassion, Tension, "Stuff," Certainty, Doubt, Love, Pain, Grace, and all the rest of us. It was a blessed time.

So there you have it-the rest of the story. But only the rest of this one story. The Living Word has many, many more stories to create with us all.

I hope you find the services this week beautiful. They were created through the grace of God by beautiful people who love you, each other, and our God very much. Thanks be to God!

Always in Hope,