My Church Weeps With Me

It was manna; it was fish and loaves; it was communion.

“I wish I could come alongside and help your children each week,” my pastor said.

We stood on a small hill in my backyard, the wind throwing my hair in my mouth. “No, of course not,” I laughed. “You’re on the stage. You need to be there. I completely understand.”

I can count between both hands the Sundays I have come to church as a single mom, and the emotions are still like wild thistles springing up in any soil their fierce roots can pierce. The loneliness, the neediness, the other couples, the crying out of my heart that this is not the way it’s supposed to be—they all come ready to choke me. 

The following Sunday, my children screamed and fought in the seats next to me—one diving over my lap, the other using his head as a weapon to claim his territory back. The third stood and gnawed on a pen with ink in his mouth. 

As my children bickered and clambered over me, my pastor stopped preaching, mid-sentence. “We are brothers and sisters,” he said. “And we help one another in need. Here is a woman in desperate need right now.” He paused, and no one moved or spoke. “Alright, let me show you what you can do.”

He stepped down from the stage, he left his microphone behind, and he knelt between the seats with us. He spoke calmly and soothingly to my three boys and even encouraged another little girl around their age to play with them too. As the boys calmed, he stepped back and handed the microphone off to a man to lead the congregation in a hymn. 

During the singing, I took the boys down to the nursery. I shuffled them inside the room with the young girl and the mom of six, quickly closing the door behind me before my children noticed. I climbed the stairs back to the sanctuary, and as I settled back into my seat, I glanced over at my friend sitting three seats away from me. We both smiled in that weary, motherly way, and she reached over between the seats to put an arm around me for a side hug. 

Six weeks had passed since someone had held me. I had received countless hugs and many squeezes on the shoulder, which is likely all she intended. My tired, burden-weary body simply fell into her arms, and as she wrapped me in an embrace, I pressed my face into her black hair and wept. For what? I don’t know, but likely everything. I hadn’t cried in so long because of the numbness needed to function. 

My pastor stepped down from his podium again, into the sea of our perhaps thirty-person congregation, he laid a hand on my shoulder, and he called the people of God to act as my siblings and Christ—to weep with me and pray over me and my boys as we had been plunged in the hottest crucible yet. 

As my friend wept above me with her chin tucked over my head, the Spirit reminded me, She has done a beautiful thing. She wept with those who wept, she mourned over the stink of death of my marriage, and she cleaned my face as the woman who cleaned Jesus’ feet. We met together that Sunday as a family limping alongside one another to glory. 

After the prayer, the pastor blessed us and sent us, but he bent low to me and my children and invited us to come and eat with him in his home for lunch. There was no beautifully prepared meal set before us; it was leftovers and whatever could be found in the fridge. It was manna; it was fish and loaves; it was communion.