The furthest I ever felt from God was probably in a church at Christmastime. The nearest was in a bar.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Eleven years ago, I was the night-desk guy at the Associated Press bureau in Montgomery, Ala. My duties kept me in town rather than visiting my family or my then-fiancée in Atlanta, where I spent most weekends. So on Christmas Eve I made my way to a service at a large local church.
It was a beautiful, grand old place, made all the prettier by the garlands and ribbons and other yuletide trimmings. There was no snow — this is the southern part of the South we’re talking about — but there was a bona fide nip in the air.
It might have felt like a scene from the quintessential holiday movie, had I been an actor. But this wasn’t a scene from someone else’s story. This was my story, my ritual. This was what I’d done on this date every year of my life. This was me.
Hear the sermon, sing the songs. Light a candle, blow it out. Go home, and settle in for that long winter’s nap.
There was one difference: It was only me.
Everyone else arrived in pairs or families or groups of friends. Those who sat alone wouldn't be staying that way. "Sorry, I'm saving these seats."
And, this being their regular church but not mine, they all knew each other. Not me. They had greetings, laughs, hugs for each other. Not for me.
You know the part of the service where the pastor invites everyone to stand and greet those around them? The person to my left turned to his left, the person to my right to her right. Those in front of me leaned forward, those behind me turned around. I wish I were exaggerating.
By the end, no one had said so much as “merry Christmas” to me. Suddenly, it didn’t feel so much like home. I had felt awfully small in that big place. And if I’m being honest — shamefully so, but honest all the same — I didn’t feel God filling up the rest of the room.
If you’ve been that stranger in the chapel, too, let me offer you this: I’ve been there. I’ve felt that.
But let me also offer this: I’ve also known something different, something better.
Fast-forward 22 months. My now-wife and I were living in Europe, a place that had largely turned its back on God. Soaring cathedrals, like empty museums. Not a place where your neighbors and co-workers ask if you’ve found a church home yet.
It was in that place, where it would have been easiest to stop looking, that I decided to keep looking. I just stopped trying to anticipate what I was supposed to find.
And so it came to pass that one autumn Sunday evening I found myself sitting in a brasserie decorated with dangling sculptures of flying pigs, listening to some missionaries holding one of their first church services — and I was 100 percent certain the Holy Spirit was with us. (No, I wasn’t drinking.)
That’s the Christmas story to me. It’s finding an omnipresent God where He’s not expected: a humbly born king who on Earth knew rejection and desertion, one who, as in that stable on that night so many centuries ago, is there for the finding.
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