The Church that Built Me

Tonight, we celebrated Jerry and Sandra Baker and Virginia McCrory.  They all three have worked tirelessly at Central Church for a long, long time.  As we shared stories about them, I thought about how Sandra Baker was the first Sunday school teacher I ever had.  I must have been 4.  I grew up with Jerry and Sandra's kids, Cindy, Kim, and David, though Cindy was several years older than me.  Fast-forward many years, and I wound up teaching their grandson Mitch at both Straughn and then at LBW.  Life comes full circle.  Jerry was one of my dad's groomsmen.  Just typing that makes me get all nostalgic.  

At some point, I left the fellowship hall to go see what my kids were doing, and as I passed this room I stopped and stared a bit.

When I was a kid, my mother was the secretary at church.  This room was her office.  It's now a teachers' work room.  It still smells the same.  It is said that smell is the scent tied most closely to memory, and I believe it.  The scent of that room took me back over 30 years.  To winter time.  To those Saturday nights that my mother would take me and my brother and sister up the building so she could finish the church bulletin.  

I can still remember the small electric heater she would use to heat the room in the dead of winter.  

I can still remember being scared of the church building at night because it was so pitch black in there.  

I can still hear the Swintec typewriter on which she typed the bulletin.  

I can still remember the White-Out she'd use when she made mistakes, which was almost never.  

I can still remember the smell of the copy paper as it came shooting out of the copying machine.  

I can still remember feeling so....normal....being a kid in a church building on a Saturday night.  

I guess I thought that was just what you did on a Saturday night.  

My mother remained the secretary until sometime shortly after my sophomore year of high school.  I'd later graduate high school, move to Troy, start attending another church, get married, have kids, change churches, change churches again, get divorced, heal from that (mostly), and somehow, 2.5 years ago, find myself back at Central.  

It's not the same as it was when I was 16.  And yet it's somehow exactly the same.  It's a community of wonderfully imperfect believers.  It's a family of all types.  All colors.  All backgrounds.  And it has blessed me so much.  I have seen love, mercy, and grace demonstrated there in unbelievable ways.  

Miranda Lambert sang a song about the "house that built me."  I suppose the same thing can apply to a church.  I walk the hall in the educational wing, and I'm a kid again.  The tapestry in the baptistry has remained unchanged since the Renaissance.  I grew up there.  And I continue to grow up there.  I was built there, at least partially.  And I'm glad my kids will be built there, at least partially.  

Jerry and Sandra, and Virginia, you are part of my raising, and I can't thank you enough.  Everyone else at Central, thank you too.  

God Bless.