Chapter 1: Eating My Words On: Restoration
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Now that you’re caught up, on to the first installment of the Eat My Words Series.
Chapter 1: The Restoration
They sang, “ Restoration” as I rubbed the lipstick stain off of my Starbucks cup. I was pretending that no one noticed me. It couldn’t have been that long since I had sat here. A few weeks at the most. Or was it? I couldn’t even remember, really. This strange rotation of Sunday routines. It’s been twenty years since I’ve missed a consecutive amount of Sunday mornings, and now, I can’t remember the last time I was here.
They were always the same. The weekend practices, the choosing of the worship set. The reaching out to band members and congregants during the week. The liturgical preparation. The scripture readings, the bible studies, the language. All the same. Twenty years. Half of those years spent with these people, in particular, the ones I’m denying eye contact with the same way your debit card reads declined. There is always a little bit of hope that someone may have miraculously added to your empty bank account overnight before the cashier runs it through the machine and it tells you what you knew all along. There’s nothing left.
They’re singing, “Restoration” and they’re singing it in the wrong key and the syncopation is off and there was no intro to lead the congregation in, like an older brother who pushes you right into the water instead of walking you in, slow. To adjust. They’re doing it wrong and there is a woman with long brown hair with a guitar and a nervous smile who closes her eyes and I consider for one moment singing the first note myself so at least the whole set won’t be off but then I remember that it’s not my job anymore. And I haven’t sung in over a year.
And I continue to rub my lipstick off of my cup in a circular motion in time with the music so that my hands will be too busy to catch the tears that began quietly, unassumingly rolling down gently one at a time into my lap. Until they were no longer rolling and they were no longer gentle and the walls seemed too close and the people all blurred and someone behind me placed wrinkled hands around mine and the woman with the guitar and the brown hair prayed the kind of prayer that only leaders do when they are not really talking to God but to the people who are listening and announced that someone desperately needed prayer and that person should come up to be restored.
And I stayed in my seat while her voice called over the noise in my head and I let her own desperation go out ahead of me because I know she feels as though she has something to prove. It’s her first few weeks in my job, after all. I held on to the wrinkled hands and told myself that they were the only thing that was real while everyone waited in silent perdition for me to return to Jesus.
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