Yesterday at our church, a lady got out of the car next to me.  She opened the door and helped a young passenger who looked like he had Down’s syndrome.  I walked behind them.  As I approached the church’s front door, a wife waited for her husband who is blind.  During announcements, one of the elders welcomed a long-time member who had just had surgery.  He was sitting with his arm in a sling.

During the singing, I heard a noise a few rows back.  The words were not at all clear, but it was the young man with Down’s syndrome singing his heart out to the Lord.   Later, I could hear the breathing of a brother who has to use oxygen in order to breathe properly.  At the end of the service, I saw an elderly brother struggling down the ramp with a walker, happy to have been with God’s people.

We often talk superficially about the need for passion without really knowing what that powerful word means.   The lovers of sights and sounds and bells and whistles would not have seen it yesterday, but Grace Bible Church was filled with it.  After all, what else could passion mean but a desire so strong to worship God that people with serious physical incapacities and in significant pain would make the effort to praise their savior and hear his word on a Sunday morning?  Within those suffering bodies burned a fire for God.

We’re not a large church.  We have more than our sharing of graying heads, and it’s highly unlikely that the movers and shakers of this world would give us a second’s thought.  That’s alright.  A not so cool Paul of Tarsus wrote a couple of thousand years ago, “Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:26-28).

That seems to sum up Grace Bible Church, and I’m thinking that is a good thing.