Editorial April 7, 1997 Issue

Lord, take me to the wake-up church!

(A prayer)

Mary Metzner Trammell

I Need Your help on this one, Lord. And, I think, so do a lot of other people. Whether they call You God or Allah or The Supreme One or The Man—or something else. They want to worship You, their most lovable Parent. They want to feel You as close as a heartbeat. Right there with them, to comfort them, care for them, show them how to do things. To be like a wonderful friend or companion or wife or husband to them—only better. Light-years and light-years better.

But here's the hard part, Lord. And You know it already, because You know everything. These children of Yours (and I'm one of them) ... they love You and want to get to know You in this unfathomably intimate way. But they don't always want to do it in the thing they call "Church."

Now admittedly, Lord, people have gotten a little mixed up about what Your Church is. Sometimes they think of it as just a building. Or as a big, layered class structure. Or as a straitjacket of rules and old-fashioned ceremonies that keep them from being who they really are. "The thing that scares me most about church," someone said to me the other day, "is that I can't be myself there. If I go to church too much, maybe there won't be any of the real me left!"

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