Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
When I was about 16 or so a youth pastor put a question to me. It was in the context of a very odd alter call. I didn’t know what an alter call was at the time, having grown up “unchurched.” He asked me and about a hundred other youth sitting on folding chairs in the gym at the Palatine (exurb of Chicago) YMCA if Jesus had come to me.
Had Jesus come to me? He wanted to know. If I could answer in the affirmative then I could exit the gym and be embraced by prayer partners. If not, then I was supposed to stay in my folding chair. For how long?
That’s what I mean by the very odd alter call. Why am I staying seated in my folding chair in the gym? I’d been going to this youth group for at least two years. I wasn’t just attending the youth group. I was a member of the “Core team.” I was memorizing verses. Was he thinking that after two years of having not shown up, suddenly, on that particular night Jesus would appear?
I sat in my chair. I waited. And I knew very well that Jesus hadn’t showed up. And he wasn’t going to show up.
So, I walked out of the YMCA. I walked past all those who had been called—who were weeping. Hands were laid upon them. Prayers were going up.
And then, decades later, out of the blue, he appeared. In a conversation I could never have anticipated, he showed up. He told me a truth I could not have expected. A hard truth that has changed everything. In telling me that truth, he liberated me from a huge burden, a great weight. He took from me a great burden that should never have been mine in the first place.
I think maybe I am the woman at the well.
Hallowed be thy name.
I thought I knew how God would show up. That’s how I knew he hadn’t. And I was wrong.
Hallowed be thy name.
We humans, like Adam and Eve, like to imagine that we know or can know who God is. What God wants. And we don’t.
Hallowed be thy name.
God shows up in a conversation. In my case, in a conversation I didn’t even want to have. He decided to tell me a truth I didn’t want to know.
I can think I know who God is. And I don’t.
Just keep showing up, God. Just keep giving me trouble. Just keep teaching me truths I don’t know I need to learn.
Hallowed be thy name.
-Sue Trollinger