A Hotel for Sinners

We were talking about belonging in Bible class when I heard the church described as “a hotel for sinners.”

That stayed with me. I started thinking about how imperfect I am, about the things I get wrong and the things I'm still trying to understand. I thought about what it means to have a place where I can be honest about those things and still feel loved.

I have that now. I feel included in the congregation I attend. I feel welcomed. When I say I'm part of the body, that means something to me because I experience it in the people around me.

But that conversation also brought me back to the church I grew up in. It brought me back to my mother, to the years when I didn't go at all, and to the feeling that something was missing even when I had plenty to keep me busy.

I've been trying to understand how all of those experiences fit together. I think I need to start with Mom.

She took us to church every Sunday morning, every Sunday evening, and every Wednesday evening. My father usually didn't come. He tried to get involved for a period, but it never became a lasting part of his life the way it was for her.

On Sunday mornings she would sing to wake us up. “Rise and shine and give God the glory, glory.” My brother and I would get ready while she helped our younger sister. That was our routine. If something else fell during church, we missed it. There wasn't much question about where we would be.

Faith was part of home, too. We prayed before meals and before bed. God mattered in the way she raised us. When I was a boy, I wanted to be a preacher. I got copies of our preacher's notes, set up my parents' video camera, and held entire church services in the living room. Announcements, singing, prayer, a lesson. I took it seriously.

I tell you that because church was a large part of who we were. These were people we knew and a place that helped shape us. My mother was trying to give her children something she believed we needed.

And I remember hearing her talk about feeling left out there.

She felt excluded from decisions. She felt she wasn't represented. Without my father attending beside her, she felt that she didn't have the same standing. I heard her talk about it, and I saw her deal with it. I can't tell you what every person intended. I can tell you that her feeling of being left out became part of how I experienced church, too.

I felt we were judged.

When I try to put words to what I thought people saw, I come back to “a broken family.” We weren't perfect by any means. There were difficulties in our home. But I didn't feel we were broken in the sense I felt they meant it.

I knew my family from inside it. My father didn't usually come to church, but he came to my practices and games. He encouraged me. He taught me to have respect for other people and to keep trying when I failed. My mother taught us through the way she lived, through her faith and the care she gave us. There was more to our family than what someone could see when we arrived at church without Dad.

I wish they had understood that even though we didn't fit their image, we belonged. We deserved to be there just like everyone else.

I still mean that. Whatever needed work in our family, we needed fellowship and support. Mom needed to feel that she was part of the congregation whose faith she was working so hard to pass on to us. I wanted her voice to matter there.

Growing up, I knew the importance we placed on attending. We arranged our lives around it. But to me, church was supposed to be more than going because the Bible told you to. I thought it was a place where people would know you, care about you, and help you through the things that were difficult. I thought that was part of what we were going for.

Watching my mother feel left out made me question whether we really had that place.

I can still feel the importance of that question, even though my experience today is different. Being welcomed now hasn't made me forget what it felt like then. It has given me something to put beside it.

When I say I belong now, I mean that people take an interest in my life. They care what I think. I can be honest about my failures. I feel like a member of God's family. Those are ordinary things to say, but after spending years away from church, they mean a great deal to me.

That is where I find myself wanting to open the Bible and look more closely at what we're saying when we call ourselves a body.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul writes about the different gifts people have and how they belong to one body. He describes a foot saying that because it isn't a hand, it isn't part of the body. Then an ear says the same because it isn't an eye. Paul asks whether saying that makes either one any less a part of it. A few verses later, he turns it around: the eye can't tell the hand, “I have no need of thee.” 1 Corinthians 12:12–21, KJV.

I find myself thinking about both sides of that. I know something about feeling different and wondering what that means for your place among other people. I also have to ask whether I've ever made another person feel that their place mattered less than mine.

Paul goes on to say that the members which seem weaker are necessary, and that the members should have “the same care one for another.” When one suffers, the others suffer with it. 1 Corinthians 12:22–26, KJV.

That phrase, “the same care,” is where I want to spend some time. I don't think you can know whether people receive that care without listening to them. My mother could be present at the services and still feel she wasn't being heard. Someone could see her there every week and never know how far outside she felt.

Paul is talking about gifts and the life of the church. I'm bringing my mother's experience to that passage because I want to understand how the care he describes becomes something people can actually experience. I want to know what we owe one another as members of that body, especially when our lives look different.

Those questions also reach beyond what happened to us. I'm aware of how easily I can hear a passage like this and begin thinking about the people who should have understood it better. I have to leave room for it to tell me something about myself. I've judged people before I understood them. I've wanted patience for my own mistakes while being quicker to reach a conclusion about someone else's.

If I'm going to ask people to see more than what they think is wrong with me, I need to consider whether I'm willing to do that for them.

My own relationship with the congregation eventually broke down over disagreements about Scripture. Later, they withdrew from me. I felt abandoned. I was angry, and I allowed myself to be pushed away. For more than ten years, I didn't attend services anywhere.

There is more to that story, and I want to take the time to tell it. For now, what matters is that I never felt abandoned by God. I could separate Him from the congregation. But I had stopped taking part in something that had once been central to my life, and I couldn't fill the space it left simply by staying busy.

I tried. Work and public service gave me a great deal to do. They gave me responsibilities and opportunities to help people. I buried myself in them, and still I didn't feel whole. Looking back, I believe that hole was my need for God.

When I eventually returned, I found people who welcomed me and took an interest in who I was. Early on, they invited me into a small group and over for dinner. They got to know me. I began praying and reading again. I started looking at my own life and the changes I wanted to make.

I think about that when I hear a phrase like “a hotel for sinners.” I know how much I needed somewhere to go with the person I actually was. There was work to do in my life, and being welcomed helped me begin doing it.

There is still work to do. I can feel loved and know that I've been wrong. I can belong and need correction. I'm learning how to hold those things together without treating every failure as a reason to hide.

That is part of what I want to talk about in this book.

I believe in God. I want Him at the center of my life and my home. I also struggle, and I don't think I can have an honest conversation about faith while leaving that part out.

I've watched people I love suffer. I watched my father live in pain and begin to fall apart, and I knew that he blamed God. It was tough to watch. When I look at the grief and devastation people live with, believing in something greater can be difficult. I still want to bring those questions to the faith I hold.

I also want to look at the things I've been taught. I grew up with convictions that helped shape me, and I still take them seriously. As I've gotten older, I've had to examine how I understand Scripture and how much of that understanding comes from the way I was raised. There are beliefs I hold firmly, things I have reconsidered, and questions I need to spend more time with.

Then there is the difficulty of living what I already believe. I know how to be stubborn. I know how to let hurt become anger and how to keep things inside instead of saying what I need to say. In writing The Inconvenient Human, I found myself talking about feelings I hadn't understood and stories I hadn't thought about in years. I began to see how much I had been carrying alone.

Faith belongs in that conversation. So do desire, grief, shame, forgiveness, and the need to be loved. These are things I bring with me when I pray or open my Bible. They are part of the life in which I am trying to understand what God asks of me.

I want to open Scripture as we go. I want to explain how I understand it and why, and be honest when I don't know. There will be places where my experience helps me notice something in a passage. There may be other places where the passage makes me uncomfortable with the explanation I've given myself. I need to be willing to stay with those, too.

You may understand some of these things differently. I hope you can still find something familiar in the effort to believe, to live well, and to find a place where you can admit how difficult that sometimes is.

I keep coming back to what I wanted for my mother and our family. We had things to work through, and we belonged. I can say that about myself today. I have things to work through, and I belong.

That gives me somewhere to begin. I can bring my failures, my questions, and the parts of my life I haven't figured out to God, and I can let other people know that I need them. I'm still learning what that looks like.

I'd like to talk about it with you.