We sat in the gym-turned-church yesterday, our band of three on the back bleachers doing our thing: bottle for the baby, burping, mopping spit-up, and all the while and in between, the praying and singing and the trying to be be present. One eye on him and one on God, or so it feels, though it hit me that when we’re watching what we’re meant to be watching, our eyes are on Him. We are worshiping when we are living the story He is telling.

I couldn’t believe it as I watched The Kid, how much he has changed in months and weeks and even days, how he sat on The Husband’s knee and looked all around, surveying the room before settling face-forward, where the people and the voices were, eyes wide and head erect, more alert than I have the energy to be. I pretended that he understood it all, that his bobbing head was actually a nodding one, even as I looked forward to the day when he will and it will be. When he will know where all his yeses and amens reside. There was a time when we couldn’t even get it together to show up on a Sunday morning (there are still those days), and there was a time when we got here and he slept through it all. And there was yesterday, when we placed him back in his stroller and he looked ahead, hands clasped across his own lap in unintentional reverence. I bowed my own head, felt my war-torn and bulging heart leap in my chest as the fullness of the moment hit me, the words sung and the love felt, and I remembered what it means to worship. In a gym. Atop bleachers. Underneath a basketball goal.

Or in an auditorium in New York City. Or on a walk with TK on a sunny Saturday, the air heavy with the fragrance of spring, and I’m talking to him nonsensically and he’s loving it, smiling even as he starts to drift off. I think to myself that if I were Oprah, I’d be multitasking right now, and I should be praying because the day is full and when will I have time to sit still and do that? And I realize that I already am, that the gazing upon this combination-TH-and-me face and telling him he is loved, that the smelling of the air and giving thanks, that simply smiling through the weariness, that this is prayer. Not a check on my to-do list, but an all-encompassing, constant acknowledgment that credit is due and not to me. And this acknowledgment lifts the weight of duty from my shoulders as I push the stroller forward into the day.

Later, B calls and we start off typically, quoting lines of 30 Rock to each other and analyzing recent trends in pop culture. Then the worship begins, again where I hadn’t planned it: expressions of appreciation for an unlikely friendship that strains the bounds of geography and other worldly limitations; a delving beyond witty repartee into deeper subjects, the Deepest in fact, and I am humbled by my one of my funniest, most well-dressed and connected of friends who deigns to hold me close enough to talk for the better past of an hour about everything from White Girl Problems to the cross. He at a luxury hotel and I with one eye on the monitor, both of us worshiping.

And yesterday afternoon, we decide to take a family field trip to the hammock, and the three of us lie in the sun and wind. TH is more optimistic than I, carrying an e-reader as I wonder whether to bring my phone in case of 911 calls, both of us personality-driven and perfectly balancing the weight lying between us, the eyes that still dart to and fro to take it all in. I think of all the hammocks in all the places that we have inhabited as two, the pictures of feet propped up in relaxation, and now there are three pairs, the third covered with sneaker socks as we lie not on a beach but in our own backyard. The moment lasts about twenty minutes–five times as long as I expected–but doesn’t it really last as long as I let it?

I took the bread and cup yesterday, took it personally for the first time in months, and as I heard my name, heard the blessing given for my family, the words rang in my ear: given on your behalf. And I realized that this moment at the table is enough for the week ahead or however long it is before I return here; this mid-morning supper is what sustains every second; this sacrament making all else sacred.