Going to church together has had several benefits that I can see. The first is that I am going to church now. Before that I had basically given up going. I didn’t care if it made my kids upset or my husband displeased with me. By that I mean that those two things were not enough to get me to go anyway to make them happy or to produce in me a sense of duty to at least go for them. I’d worked on my attitude for years. Maybe something was actually just wrong with the situation or the church.

The second benefit that I have seen is that I do not have the loneliness or dread that I had for years when I was actually going. Like it just isn’t there at all now. I like driving to church together and even if we’re going to early service and leaving extra early and even earlier to pick up a camp friend I am happy to do it and it doesn’t bother me. The boys are in the back seat and Elianna has been coming with us too in the summer. There’s no more watching them walk away while I remain in the house.

The third benefit I can see is that I actually like the pastors and hearing what they have to say. The head pastor is a really great Bible teacher. I don’t know how to explain the metrics I’m using to determine that. Basically I would say that he is one with the text. He is the one who loves it and is drawn toward learning it himself. He puts down Baptists sometimes but I have thought about telling him that he should be grateful toward them and credit them for teaching him so much of the Bible.

So those are the big ones. The thing that hasn’t really changed much is feeling like there still isn’t much of a church community to be a part of. You sit in the pew for a little over an hour, and then drive to the school to sit in the chair for Bible class, but there isn’t much else happening socially. There are some people and couples our age but no one who really stands out as the, “We ought to totally be friends with them” people. I don’t crave friendship as much but I do still wonder about it.

The friends I thought we’d have for life did not turn out to be that way. Now I understand that friend breakups are a thing, but before it had happened I had no idea, not to that deep and painful extent. And we were the ones who were clearly broken up with. One of those couples is now divorced and another we do not talk to and have not talked to since almost ten years ago when we went our separate ways on vacation. I’ve noticed I do not trust people the same, or put my heart out for them.