My heart is hurting...

La Diva takes piano through a community music initiative. They utilize a church for the lessons. The Hero has taken her to most of her lessons so far. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to take her and sit quietly in the sanctuary while she played. I did my busy work for that time and had some time to spare so I decided to flip through the hymnal to look for some hymns I remember from my childhood. I grew up in that denomination but we left when they started going sideways with their teachings. Anyway... I was in a girls group called Explorers and our song was "This is My Father's World" so I looked it up and was so sad to find that they had changed the words "This is God's Wondrous World". Then I flipped through to find other hymns that traditionally contained reference to Our Father had also been changed. The saddest to me was finding a new version of the Lord's Prayer in the back of the hymnal... it starts "Our Father-Mother who art in heaven.."

I knew that they were going to all inclusive language. In fact, I worked for a lawyer who was defending my former Pastor against the presbytery because he refused to teach their new doctrine. It was seeing it in black and white while I was feeling nostalgic for hymns from my childhood that really hit me with the full force of it. It was very odd to me how much it shook me last night. I've known about this road they were taking for years as it started when I was in high school. I watched my parents and other members of our church fight against it, watched old timers leave all church forever, watched my parents surf from one church to another trying to find a home, saw myself turn my back on everything I grew up believing in my late teens and early 20s. Now at 39 years old it hits me like a ton of bricks. Perhaps it is the memory of how it shook my faith, how I saw hypocrisy in Christianity for the first time, how I saw brothers and sisters in Christ divided in ways that I never thought possible. Since coming back to the Lord the cry of my heart has been:

Psalm 133: 1 How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!

Sadly, that seems a hopeless goal. Sadly, I often see "Christians" treating each other worse than I see those of "the world", as we like to say, treating their fellow man. Sadly, the hypocrisy has become greater since that moment in my life. Sadly, their I times when I wish I could love the Lord as I do but not be lumped into that group that is labeled "Christian" as sometimes the actions of myself and others shame me.

I guess seeing it all with my own eyes in a hymnal, that red book of familiarity found in the back of every pew of any church of this denomination, that book that kept a little girl from fidgeting too much during service from the time I could read the words therein... seeing it in that book somehow made it real to me.