Worship Defines My Reality, Not ALS

 (The following article first appeared in The Epistle, the newsletter of St. James Episcopal Church.)

For the last five years, ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, has been a constant presence in my life. It is a fatal illness characterized by decreasing muscle strength. I have watched myself lose the ability to walk, talk, eat, and lift my arms out of my lap. I had to resign from work and move out of my home into a nursing facility. My life is punctuated by quarterly trips to an ALS Clinic in Charlotte where the progress of the disease is assessed and treated. I sleep every night with a machine that helps me breathe. I spend much of every day connected to another machine that pumps nutrients into my stomach through a feeding tube. ALS is ever present, deciding for me what I can and cannot do. Some people might say that ALS determines the reality of my life.

They would be wrong. Worship at St. James Episcopal Church determines the reality of my life.

When the bell rings at the start of worship, a profoundly different reality begins. We enter into an experience that transcends time and place as we commune with our spiritual ancestors and descendants. A foretaste of heaven is spread before us. We sing praises to our Creator and God. We hear the words of God spoken to us and we speak our words to God in prayer. We eat spiritual food in the sacrament of Jesus' body and blood. We join the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord. We await His return with eager expectation, for we are already partakers of eternal life. We are sent forth to serve our Lord with gladness and singleness of heart. We are strengthened to live as citizens of heaven on earth.

It might be more accurate to write that God determines my reality. While true, it is in worship that I experience the majesty of God in the liturgy, vaulted ceiling, and stained glass windows. It is in worship that I experience the intimacy of God in words heard and sacrament consumed. I associate with people I might not know otherwise who turn out to be my sisters and brothers in the faith. I learn that God loves me just as I am and helps me to become better than I am. In worship I am confronted by the tremendous mystery of a loving God. All of these things shape the reality of my life.

I have bet my life on the reality of God I find most fully expressed in worship. Every Sunday I vote with my presence in worship that the reality of God will be my reality. Not ALS or even the joy I find in friends and family will become more important to me than God.

I sit in the back at St. James in my power wheelchair and watch my brothers and sisters arrive for worship and take the sacrament. We have our stories of diseases to fight, children and grandchildren to love, marriages to make and sustain, lost loved ones to grieve, work struggles to overcome, loneliness to endure, and all the other circumstances of life that try to consume our attention. Distract us they will, but consume us they will not, for we have decided that our worship of God will define and create the reality of our lives.