The optimist looks at the world and thinks, “The situation: serious, not hopeless.” But the Christian looks at the world and thinks, “Situation hopeless, but not serious.” –G.K. Chesterton

(Yesterday I wrote a piece over at The Wheelhouse Review mocking the Church’s delivery of the Gospel to the world. I like satire, cousin that it is to sarcasm, my love language. And I believe that humor can be the balm to many an ill in this world. But I also believe that it needs to be mixed with a hefty dose of heart to do any good, and that’s where this companion piece comes in: as the “heart” side of the coin to yesterday’s “humor” side.)

We were late, which is better than absent, which we often are on Sundays. After dropping The Kid off in the nursery, The Husband and I claimed our back-row seats in the gym and settled in for the prayer. TK’s name, uttered by our pastor, jarred me out of my sleepy reverence. I poked TH–we hadn’t put TK on the prayer list. We didn’t have to.

I cry at church every week now.

I grew up with a nearly perfect church attendance record. If the youth group had an event on the calendar, you can bet I was there. And I was the consummate student–in fact, “student” was practically my whole identity until I was almost thirty–so I think I would have heard it if they had delved into the whole grace thing. But I didn’t. Which is why, my first Sunday as a resident of New York City, I showed up at Redeemer and found myself being introduced to grace. To the idea that my preceding record (which I had, until recently, been quite proud of) was not the measure of my worth. This was news to me.

I never used to cry at church.

And I grew up in the Southeast, where emotional appeals run rampant in church services, where altar calls and prayer are paired with plaintive music like a steak with red wine. There seemed to be a veneer to the whole thing, and it’s funny that I picked up on that veneer but not my own, because I was sporting a similar one. There are a lot of people out there pretending to be something they’re not. And a lot of them are at church every week. And that’s not so much a disconnect as it is an exposure–a revealing of misplaced faith.

I heard the Bible preached as instruction, never narrative. Jesus was more of an image–all tan skin and crinkly warm eyes and flowing hair and good deeds–than a real person. Our congregation clutched its collective pearls after our pastor, a widower, dared to marry a woman who dared to have a past that included divorce. There was a Bible verse to support any opinion–people read Scripture; we didn’t let it read us. It was all very orderly and regimented and sanitary. Four-alliterative-point sermons, a couple of hymns, sign the attendance book. Lather, rinse, repeat.

No wonder The Dad never wanted to go. None of it felt real.

There are all kinds of churches, and there need to be. Let me tell you about ours, now: this week, our pastor held up a t-shirt he owns that reads, “I love Jesus but I cuss a little.” His wife has a matching one, except it says, “but I drink a little”. I want that shirt. I get asked about TK’s neck every week by people whose stories I know, whose struggles have been shared. I can’t fly under the radar here (though I earned my pilot’s license in that very activity long ago). And every week, like clockwork, something sets off the tears in my eyes. There is more of Jesus in one sincere moment than a thousand kept rules.

I cry at church now because it means something more than signing an attendance sheet and keeping up an appearance. Because the notes strike a chord deep within me, deeper than conformity and technique and behavior modification and self-reliance. If I want to know how to be a better person, I’ll hit up the self-help section at Barnes and Noble (who am I kidding? I’d go to Amazon so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone). Before grace, the closest I came to a transcendent moment was nailing a yoga pose (RARE). Now I find myself lifted out of the commonplace all the time, because it has become sacred.

The Christian church needs to stop preaching strategy. The only technique to grace is open hands.

Yesterday, TK and I had a double-header at Children’s for physical and speech therapy appointments. His PT is always hard, full of his tears and often ending with him passing out from exhaustion on my shoulder. When we headed to his speech appointment, we passed multiple patients whose problems are arguably much larger. The wheelchair-bound, those who can’t feed themselves, the guy with a dramatic limp. I looked down at my guy, clenching my hand as he trotted alongside me, collar on his neck to prop his head upright, and familiar tears sprang to my eyes. This pool of water on my lower lid, so commonplace now that grace and TK have arrived, is sacred. The water clears my eyes and the mask is gone and I see now, see the brokenness all around me. But I see the hope too: the hope of people who don’t have to pretend, whose insides are on their outsides because all of us are walking around with a limp and a tilted head.

“The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints,” goes the quote, and I wonder what we would look like to the world if we stopped chasing prosperity and numbers and perfection and rules and started opening our hands to grace as it comes: messy, limping, tearful and true. I wonder if, to the world, we would just look more like them.