Last Wednesday I had dinner with a friend of mine and afterwards went to see the new Spiderman movie. During the course of the evening, we shared with each other some of our parallel experiences with church life.
If there is ever anybody who can understand you, it is someone who has been through much the same things.
Each of us reacts differently to life’s circumstances, but there is always a commonality to what we go through.
As we talked, I began to realize the depth of the hurt I have been feeling since leaving the church I was a part of for 22 years. No doubt I have worked through a lot of these feelings through this blog and perhaps even a conversation or two with some of you reading this.
To mourn is to:
…feel or express grief or sorrow; lamentation.
So we can begin to see that leaving a church is much like losing a friend to an illness—some of the same patterns of behavior are manifested.
However, that is maybe a subject for another time.
During this process, a friend of mine visited the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. She participated in some of the worship times and brought back some of the worship music on a CD which she gave to me. I have uploaded the first session with Misty Edwards as the leader and must say that listening to this has helped ease my heart and given me some new hope as I persue my walk with the Lord.
It is located at my website:
The song she begins with is a Chris Tomlin song we are all familiar with. It’s about 24 minutes long and I downsampled it so you can listen without bandwidth issues.
Let me know what you think.
Looking For The Long Ride 
Thanks for putting that song on there… I love the harmonies, her voice is beautiful and rich. I don’t get to hear much worship music in English, so that was a nice change to my morning web-surfing. About the mourning… I definitely went through that for a long time after leaving Boone. I mean, we lost our best friends through that, and then we examined it and felt like maybe we were never friends after all, since ministry was all we had in common. That hurt! I mourned the loss of mentors, partners in ministry, friends for my kids, even a job. I actually took meds for more than a year to deal with my depression because it affected me so much.Through time I was able to see things through a completely different perspective. I am thankful for the things God did in me during those years, and I did learn a lot. I have some wonderful memories, and I don’t want them to be robbed anymore! I want to remember and rejoice in what God did, not what the enemy did, or even what man did during that time.