The Fellowship of the Mat

I can't write long because it's late and I have been short on sleep lately, but I have to relate a great blessing that occurred tonight. I went to my small group, which is usual on Tuesdays. It has been so wonderful lately, and honestly I've been a bit put in my place. I think I went into it a little prideful thinking, a bunch of 20-something girls in New York City are not capable of being real with each other. I'm sure it will be this big fake thing every week where we sit around and spout Scripture and are never actually vulnerable with each other. I don't think this particular thought completely entered my mind, but I know that was my attitude at least in part. Sometimes my total self-absorption is truly astonishing.

Anyway, I could not have been more wrong, and here it is only three months that we've been meeting and today we put all our junk out there. We've been studying the names of God, and tonight's name was Jehovah Rapha - The Lord Who Heals. I love the concept of healing and just the study of it really seems to help me heal, so I was looking forward to this a lot. There were only about ten of us there (I think we have about 15 regulars), and so we all got to share areas in our lives that God needs to heal. The transparency was unreal. I was so amazed. I wound up feeling like I hadn't been vulnerable enough, even though I said more than I've ever said in front of a group I've only seen once a week for a few months.

As the girls shared, I couldn't help but think back to the only other truly genuine small group I think I've ever been a part of, which was last year. It was made up of the girls I worked at The Gathering Place with, and we were so real with each other because Mama Harriet basically forced us to be. Since five of us went to UGA and we already knew each other's stuff, it only made sense to keep meeting. So we did, and I think our presence in each other's lives really made a difference. It didn't last like I hoped it would, but the brief time we were all involved, powerful things were happening. We called ourselves The Fellowship of the Mat, after the story of the paralytic in Luke 5. The key verse in that passage is the last one, which says that Jesus saw THEIR faith (meaning the paralytic's friends) and healed the man. Everybody has a mat, some completely debilitating condition (a wound, a sin, a fear) that they can't overcome alone. We're meant to live in community, to experience Christ in community, and really the only way tha we can be healed of our mats is if we have brothers and sisters who are willing to have faith for us, and carry us to Jesus when we're paralyzed.

I shared that passage and felt like maybe lightning had struck twice. Maybe, just maybe, I could experience that same kind of vulnerability and shared suffering again. And I realized that one of the things I need healing from is essentially an experience in failed community from this summer. I don't know if I think anything is ever a complete failure, and I absolutely believe that I was supposed to be in the house and that the things that happened happened for a reason, but the way things fell apart in the end, and especially the way my relationships have more or less disintegrated over the last month and a half or so, wounded me. I wanted to believe that if a group of people came together and desired to be the body to one another, it would happen, and in the final analysis, it didn't happen. There were a lot of contributing factors, but it still felt like a failure.

I guess that's maybe why I came into this group a bit cynically. But all my doubts were proven to be wildly wrong tonight. I felt deeply encouraged in my own struggle, and that coupled with the solidarity I felt in hearing other's experiences gave me a place where before I hadn't had one. A place in a city full of strangers, where you're constantly receiving physical contact but never touched. Tonight I was touched, in more ways than one. So thank You Lord for these girls, especially Kristen, Amanda, Jenny, Julie, Liz, Emily, Victoria, and Anna, who so bravely unveiled their faces tonight. Surely a victory for the kingdom was won in that room.

Song In My Head: "Wintersong" - Sarah McLachlan - not related to this entry, but I listened to it basically nonstop all afternoon. It's gorgeous. That's all I have to say.