The Flyswatter--and the Cross

 I have this uncanny way of putting the most unlikely things together--like a flyswatter and a cross. But here's how it happened.

So Sunday morning I was at the mission office kitchen making Sunday dinner. But while the ham and veggies roasted and the banana cake baked, I went over to the quiet chapel to have some prayer time.

I couldn't help pausing at the front of the chapel where there were these two chairs where Keith and Tasbah Lavery sit, with this little green chair in between where little three-year-old Yamni sits. And there on that green chair lay an orange flyswatter. 

The reason it was there is that flies tend to enjoy coming to chapel, too, and Yamni loves to swat them before service!

That flyswatter was just a little illustration of the simplicity and welcome found in this little chapel--a place where you are allowed to come as you are.

Where the pastor sits in the same chair as everyone else and teaches from his chair instead of from up behind a high-sounding pulpit.

A place where little children are valued. The chapel has at least three little chairs set in places where young families sit with small children. Because children are welcome.

So is everybody.  

And the plaque up front, "Come as You Are," ministered to me that quiet morning. 

So did the cross. 

I know, I'm a person who is a little bit weird, but I do things like go up to a cross and just treat it like it really was Jesus' cross.

A place where He is present, because of His shed blood, still pleading for a simple person like me, over there in my old blue jacket and just-washed hair.  

And I just go up to it and lean my head against it, and bring myself and my needs to Him, without saying a whole lot.

Just leaning into the cross.

I feel sure He understands. 

And then I sit down at the piano and open the hymnal to "Just as I Am," and I play it. 

I'm sure I don't get out of it all I could if I weren't so concentrated on getting the notes right, but I think God understands notes without words, too.

 Big prayers are sometimes encapsuled in trembling notes and bowed heads,

i

in simple chapels where orange flyswatters lie across a little child's chair.