On the weekend, I did one of the most Vineyard-y things I’ve ever done in my life: I took two of my tinies to a worship flagging workshop. Like, it was a class about great big coloured flags and how to wave them well during church as part of the worship service.

So we have flags. We wave flags.

I know.

It’s weird to outsiders, and I get that. But I guess I can admit now that most of what we do as Christians is a bit weird to outsiders and so just roll in the weird altogether.

I’m not a flagger myself but I have an unreasonable love for people who wave the flags. I’ve reached the point in my story when I want all the crazy. All of it. I want the sloppy prayers and the hope and the flags and the unreasonable and embarrassing expectations for the voice of God to break through my life and the unprofessional dancers and the praying in tongues and the Eucharist and the Book of Common prayer being read aloud like it’s slam poetry in an old warehouse. I want anointing oil in my purse and ashes on my forehead.

Part of my own story is that I went for a big wander outside of my my mother Church, encountering different and new and ancient ways of experiencing and knowing and being changed by our big and generous God as if I were encountering occasional cups of water while in the desert, drinking each one down as if they were sustaining me for the next leg of the journey. But at the end of the story – or at least at the point of the story where I am right now, who can say if this is the end? – I came home.I came home to the school gyms and the folding chairs, the humble people of God also thirsty for the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit, imperfect and sometimes disappointing and unabashedly sincere and utterly beloved to me. 

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