To Worship Unmolested

"...to worship unmolested.." was a phrase I heard in public prayers many times as a child, and had no idea what it meant. I remember asking my mom in the car on the way home from the church building what "molested" meant and getting a definition that really made this prayer confusing. Eventually I came to understand that we were meant to be "grateful to live in a country where Christians could assemble to worship without persecution."

I get it-- some people don't have that privilege--I acknowledge that persecution exists and is real in our world. But it always sounded so far away to me. It is hard for me to actually feel gratitude for something that I have never known (or seen or even heard about) the absence of. It always felt a bit like standing in the desert being thankful for sand. I know, we should be grateful--even for sand in the desert--but come on, are you really??

But here in Nicaragua this phrase is coming to mean something else to me. We are blessed to have a place to meet together, a real concrete building with official church-y pews and everything. We have a microphone, a lectern, a baptistery on wheels...and oh so much more.

We have two garage-style doors that open up onto the bus station and central municipal market. We have loudspeakers playing the greatest hits of the 80's, vendors yelling about chips for sale, whistle-blowing traffic directors and buses that aren't afraid to use their air-horn.  We have drunk men joining us--sometimes quietly other times exuberantly, angrily, or incoherently. We have what can only be called "packs" of the dirtiest, smelliest, sweetest, unsupervised "market-kids" running in and out and talking to you at the top of their voices. We have mosquitoes and termites randomly visiting various parts of my body, and a children's class that meets in the same open space as the rest of the assembly. We have little old ladies who read aloud each scripture referenced because that is their level of literacy. We have feral dogs wandering the aisles, and pounding rain on metal roofs that sometimes floods in the back doors. And of course, through all of this I am trying to understand what is being said in an unfamiliar language.

Worship unmolested? Certainly not. There is so much to distract me, to bother me, to take my attention away from what I have come to do.

But it doesn't.
Perhaps precisely because so much concentration is required.

How many times have I sat in expertly lighted, perfectly temperature-controlled auditoriums, with well regulated sound systems, well planned worship programs, helpful visual displays, and let the words which had been so carefully prepared go completely unheard while I thought about who to invite out for lunch, and wrote out grocery lists, and what might be on TV that afternoon?

A new friend of mine is fond of saying, "I don't want to "sell" Jesus. I don't want to make it sound easy. You have to want Him, you have to work for Him, you have to seek Him."

Maybe it is harder to worship when we are so very unmolested. Maybe in trying to make things so easy--we make it harder to distinguish what is valuable. Maybe we need to learn to be grateful for the bothersome things--rather than the comforts.

Now I finally know what it is that those pray-er people of my childhood were trying to make me grateful for. And now I know that it is easy to confuse which things are the challenges and which are the blessings.

Matthew 5 The Message