Quietly Engaged

My word for 2017 is "creation," but I'm having a hard time applying that to Sunday mornings.

As I've noted before, any church I find in Cincinnati is going to be Red River Junior in my mind for a while, and there's no displacing such an amazing group of beloved brothers and sisters from their perch in my heart in such a short time. The church I've been attending is getting closer, though--I think it's safe to say I've found my people.

Probably not these on a Sunday
morning, either. Source:
Radu Fizesan on freeimages.com.

So what can I do, as the very new person, to bring creation with me when we gather on Sunday mornings? (I'm not gathering with them today, though, since I'm sitting 100 miles away.) Obviously I want to do my part to create and sustain a community, and for now that looks like desperately trying to remember everyone's names--I've fallen back on my old strategy of learning the women's names first, then figuring out who's married to whom (single people are actually easier to remember with this strategy--I'm not leaving y'all out!), and eventually I'll remember from one week to the next which bearded man is which. Seriously, that's a lot of beards in one place on a Sunday morning.

And despite all the exhortation that the worship time is corporate and participatory, there's a lot of sitting quietly on Sunday mornings--I did most of my sermon-time creating back when I was young enough to be kept occupied with crayons and paper. One reason I got in the habit of tweeting particularly resonant things that the minister says is to make sure I'm engaging my brain. I'm not sure that counts as creation, except that I'm adding to the noise of 21st-century life. Not the creation I was going for, but maybe right now that's the best I can do.

How do you make your Sundays an act of creation?