I went to church today, and while I’m not sure my relationship with god or any higher power has changed, my consciousness has. I’m sure that sounds a bit like I’ve become a Jesus freak, but if there’s anything I learned today, it’s that the people in that service are not freaks, they were just lost at some point and needed to find something to believe in. We’ve all been there, sometimes we end up back there. Some believe in Jesus, some believe in crystals, I’m not sure there’s a significant difference in each persons belief, or their right to believe.

Anyways ironically my recap of church as nothing to do with Jesus, or faith. I went for a couple of reasons, my boss is a devote christian and often uses analogies about Jesus Christ to explain things. I went because I wanted to understand more of him, his family, and his reason for his person. I’ll pause and say he’s one of the kindest, most intelligent, happy, loving people I’ve ever met, and he believes that’s because of Jesus Christ. So I said hey I’m gonna come to church I wanna try to understand you a little better and experience what you experience each week.

When I arrived and he saw me his eyes lit up, he gave me the biggest hug I’ve maybe ever received and immediately started taking me around to meet people and say hello to a bunch of people I already knew as they work with us at craft food halls. He brought me to the auditorium as they began to prepare for service and sat me in the front row, I didn’t know what to expect so I was a bit nervous. The beginning of service was the choir doing Christmas carols, then came a humbling moment. Gardy is in the band and when they were finished and the pastor got up to speak, instead of sitting with his wonderful wife and children Gardy sat with me, showed me the different prayers as we went, and just made sure I didn’t feel out of place.

I know a lot of you probably have an idea of what this is like, but it’s a very modern church, the pastor was wearing jeans and a sweater. He asked to meet me after and when he saw my hand tattoos he said my wife won’t let me do my hands yet and rolled up his sleeves. This dude has more tattoos than me it was nuts. It was really something beautiful, to see people show up for each other, and for something they all believe and share together, it felt like a community.

The one thing that really took me aback was a very simple interaction between two people joining the service. One man said “nice to see you” and the man he said it to responded with “it’s nice to be seen”. Wow. I thought about that all day. What a moving thing to say. See in both my professional and personal life, all I ever want is to make people feel seen and heard. This desire comes from a broken childhood where I didn’t feel seen or heard. In fact a lot of my life I’ve felt as close to invisible as you can get. I’ve always struggled with feeling like people aren’t there for me the way I’m there for them, and sometimes people just not being there at all.

It made me realize that people who believe in Jesus Christ, are often people who have gone through struggle. I heard a quote “no one shows up to church for the first time because they’re in a good place” People show up to find something bigger than then to align with. I’m not sure if Jesus is who I align with, but the community at all people church is very much one that I can get behind, because they’re doing the same thing I’m doing, they’re just using a different outlet. What a humbling experience.

It’s nice to be seen,

J