Everyone Worships Differently:

I volunteer in church for a group called, “Treehouse,” and this is our child’s ministry.  Recently, after church, we had training.  It was a nice time to talk to others who are a part of the children’s ministry who I usually don’t get to spend time talking to.  Then the question asked of us to ponder with our particular groups was, “how do we help the kids encounter God?” What a question?!  Then we moved on to different ways we as volunteers or we as people in general ponder and worship God.  Some of the items we listed were drawing, being out in the garden, prayer, reading of the scriptures, and worship of music. 

This hit me in very affirming ways.  For much of my Christian life, I had always felt bad because I am not the ideal worshiper.  What I mean by this is when singing is happening in the church, I sing and stand, but I am not jumping for joy, I am not the one dancing or raising my hands.  Honestly, it makes me feel a bit out of sync or uncomfortable when I think about doing this.  Now, I want to be honest, this is still something I should work on.  I should be better at listening to the music in church and really letting the lyrics and the truth behind them resonate in my life.  I love going to concerts and weddings and dancing to music, so why do I struggle with it when it comes to church music? 

However, I realized through this training that people do genuinely worship in different ways because we are different people.  We worship and see God through different experiences.  Some do encounter and worship God through painting.  Some are really great about choosing to worship God through their musical choices and through listening and praising in church.  Others could spend hours reading the Bible.  While I believe all of these are good, and things we as Christians should continue to grow in, especially when it comes to praising in song and reading of scripture, we can also be happy to know we have a different way of worship and different experiences than those who are around us.  

I realized in the last year or so, that my way of worship is through writing and especially through writing on this blog.  I have learned a lot through writing my blogs.  It helps me reflect on what I am learning in my time alone with God, in my times at church, and then also in my regular life and the life lessons I have learned.  It has helped me look at everything in a new perspective, and I hope I have opened the door for others to learn through my blog. 

Psalm 75:1, “We praise you, God, we praise you, for your Name is near; people tell of your wonderful deeds.” This is exactly what worshiping God is all about.  It is the love of God overflowing out of you into the world.  Usually we associate it with singing God’s praises because that is one common way people see the love of God out of another person’s actions. It is all about helping others find Jesus through telling them of His great deeds. This is true worship.  It is not something that can be manufactured to fit what everyone else believes to be worship.  

This is very important for me to share because I believe we can get very distraught as believers and as people in general in the comparison game.  We can start to look more at what someone else is good at as opposed to focusing on what we are good at, and what we bring to our relationship with God.  We can start to believe we are not a good Christian just because we don’t do something a certain way, but this is just not how our faith in God or our time in worship should work.  

My challenge for you this week is for you to think about how you personally best worship God. This could be through a lot of different things.  This could be through painting, through prayer, through singing of worship songs, etc.  Then the second part of this challenge is I want you to spend an hour in this next week praising him through that particular way of worship, and show/tell someone else what you did, so they can too be inspired by your worship in God as well.