Memorial Day to Remember

Churches have a lot of worship gatherings in the course of a year. The church I serve is a new church. (Check my link for information on us.) In a typical 52 week span we will have 58 gatherings. If you take into consideration that we have two each weekend that number balloons to 110 meetings a year. For anyone who attends churches, we know that the vast majority of these gatherings are . . . shall we say “forgettable.” (That is the subject for another blog! And, remember that statement is coming from someone who spends his life planning these weekly times of corporate worship.)

Yesterday was one of the worship gatherings that will definitely not be forgotten by the folks who were in attendance at Fountain Park Church for some time. We had probably our largest attendance apart from Easter this year. How many churches in Pittsburgh had to put out additional chairs on Memorial Day weekend? Not many would be my guess.

As a matter of fact, just this morning I received an email stating, “Thank you again for the opportunity to house Moses, Issa and Uncle Frederick. I really enjoyed the weekend, concert and service. It was something I will not forget.”

What was so unforgettable about this weekend? Vision. This weekend our folks got a vision of something much larger than themselves. This weekend they saw in clear terms how the “stuff” we spend our lives collecting does not bring happiness. We saw children who spend less in a lifetime than most of us do in a year smile like few of us were smiling.

We were privileged to hear the Watoto African Children’s Choir from Uganda, East Africa. These boys and girls and their chaperons ministered to us like we have seldom had happen. You see, each of the boys and girls are orphans. They have had the horrible experience of having both of their parents die. In almost every case it was from HIV/AIDS. For my church this was powerful, because this was the fourth event that has come across our path to show us the horror of the disease in the past six months. My trip to Africa this fall has taken on larger than life proportions for me now.

This weekend HIV/AIDS was not an article on the evening news or MSN.com. It was living breathing boys and girls with a smile on their face and a joy in their heart that does not come from material gain. It was an opportunity to see the future leaders of a country that is seeing the present adult population die in alarming numbers. It was a chance to hear how we could actually do something besides click our tongues and say “Someone should do something.”

Yeah, someone should. And the church of Jesus Christ (you and me) is that someone.