Here I Am To Worship

I've been thinking this week about worship. What it is and what it isn’t.

I've been reading Romans 12:1 and remembering that worship is bigger than the hour set aside to pray and sing and share communion. Worship isn’t simply giving praise to God, but a giving of our whole selves as sacrifices to God.

So, if that's true, then why take the hour a week?

When I was a kid, my buddy Mark's dad would drop into town once every couple of weeks, take him out to lunch and a movie and get some "quality time" into a couple of hours. And that was their relationship. A couple of hours every few weeks. And I can tell you, because he told me, it never felt like enough to Mark.

When I was a kid, my family had one night a week that we set aside as family night. We were together all the time, living life together in the same house, but that hour enhanced what was already an amazing family experience. It helped us reorient ourselves, in case we had gotten off track.

I think the hour of worship is meant for us to reorient and rethink, to renew and revere and remember. To put things back into their proper place. Because it takes about a week for me to put myself front and center, my hopes, my dreams, my plans, my problems, my job, my money, my house, my family. In the process, Christ gets off center, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot.

If that hour is the only hour I spend with my Father and my Christian family, it will never be enough. Because we're meant to do life together, not just an hour of praise.

But even though worship is an ongoing process of giving myself over to God, that hour of worship is a necessary time for us to remember those things that we too quickly forget. That God is good. That Jesus is Lord. That the loss of a parking space or a job or even a loved one doesn’t change that fact. We don’t come to forget the world outside, but to put it in its place. To be put in our place. And to remember Christ’s place as the center of our lives.