At Trinity

"By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life." — Psalm 42:8

Someone had propped the double doors open before the service and the August heat came in and sat down in the pews like it had been invited.

The sanctuary was warm. Not the unbearable warm of last Sunday but the warm that makes the hymnals soft in your hands and the pages stick to your fingers when you turn them. The fans were running. Mrs. Patterson had her church fan working, the cardboard kind with the wooden handle and the picture of Jesus on one side and the funeral home advertisement on the other. I have not used a church fan in years but I understand the impulse.

Pastor Holloway preached from the Psalms. I will not say what he said because what stays with me from a sermon is never what the pastor thinks will stay. What stayed with me this morning was a moment before the sermon, during the hymn. We sang "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" and I sang it the way I have sung it for sixty years, from memory, and somewhere in the second verse I stopped singing and just listened.

The congregation sounded like what a congregation sounds like in August, which is thin. People are traveling. People are at the lake. People are sleeping in because it is summer and the guilt of missing church is lighter when the sun is out. But the people who were there were singing, and the sound was honest, and I stood in it the way you stand in a warm rain when you have decided not to run.

Edna was in her pew. The Millers were two rows back. There were faces I see every Sunday and faces I see most Sundays and two faces I did not recognize, which is always a quiet pleasure, the way a garden is pleased by a new bird at the feeder even though the garden did not invite it.

I prayed through the pastoral prayer with my eyes open, which I do sometimes. I looked at the light coming through the windows on the east side, which is stained glass that is not beautiful but is familiar, and familiar is its own kind of beautiful after enough years.

August. The second half of summer. The church will thin out a little more before it fills back up in September. I will be here. I am always here. The showing-up is the thing.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.