Dear Friends of Second Church,

This week, I’ve been reading a bit about L’Arche communities, a network of small houses throughout Europe and the Americas in which abled and physically handicapped/neurologically atypical people live together in Christian fellowship.  While most of the physical care is done by the abled, the emotional and spiritual care is shared by all, and the relationships are tremendously powerful and, at their best, profoundly holy.  

That’s not to say it’s easy.

As we all know, true community never is.  

Many of the handicapped members of these houses come to them only after difficult or even traumatic experiences in other institutions or in their own family homes, and learning to trust is a long process.  This means that quite often, the community is tasked (in the words of one volunteer) with “waiting for the beauty in each person” to emerge.  

I’ve been turning over that phrase in my mind for the last few days, thinking about how that is a good description of the work of churches, at our best.  

Not only do we see and celebrate the true beauty in people, but we are also prepared to wait alongside them as that beauty begins to emerge, however slowly that may be — as the grinding depletions and exhausting expectations of life’s challenges and past history have time and space to heal.  

We don’t always acknowledge how hard it can be to let our guard down.  

Sadly, some churches don’t offer a safe place in which to do so.   (Don’t get me started….)

But it’s a different sort of sadness to realize that the idea of doing so may not actually occur to many who do come.

And yet for some, admitting vulnerability has become so unthinkable that they don’t seek shelter for it among the gathered people of the church, kind as so many of those church people may seem.  Shelter isn’t even what many visitors come for, at least consciously.

We need to do better at making sure they find it, anyway. And quickly.

I can’t help but think how puzzled and relieved they would be to discover, first that shelter, and then the beauty within them that shelter can finally coax into view.  

With all that we offer and all that we wish we could, our primary task is to be a place where God’s love can do its thing.    

When it does, the lives that follow are beautiful, indeed.  

See you in church,