Dismal Performance?

I gotta admit I started off in a bit of a funk yesterday morning at the 11:15.

Arriving in the nick of time at 11:10 AM, soon as I stepped into the atrium I heard a woman's voice call my name. I looked up and down, to the left and all around, but never recognized a face or saw who it was.

Besides, I was hurrying because I was supposed to meet a guy (a NS member and volunteer; he's also got an awesome tattoo in Hebrew I might wanna copy for myself) for the service but he must've given up ... because he wasn't in the place where we'd agreed to meet. My baaaad.

So as the counter counted down and I settled into an empty seat all by my lonesome, as usual, and folks I didn't recognize arrived to sit on either side, I realized that my closest friends (and the ones I'm used to sitting with) all share something in common: ORP (who used Twelve Stages of Insistence to finally convince me to Just Go One Time), Fran, Valerie and Sss were all going to NS a long time before I was.

I should feel comfortable and be used to sitting beside folks I don't know or recognize after all this time, but not yet I'm not.

Hmmm.

I also realized that of all the folks I've invited to visit in the past 3 years only three have actually showed: TPW, her son Karl, and Kathey. Just three in three years.

My personal success (or failure?) record, considering the thousands of people who were there, seemed abysmal and disappointing because every Sunday there's more and people showing up with new faces. I glanced behind me and thought Well, maybe somewhere in those 2500 seats are some of the people I've invited, and I just don't know they're there.

But then it doesn't really matter very much whether people accept my invitation, or if my Personal Record of Invitations Accepted seems abysmal and discouraging.

What's important is that somebody's invitations are being accepted ... in HUGE NUMBERS from all over the Upstate ... and somewhere in those seats are people who're there not because of me or my invitation ... but because they needed to hear about accepting Christ's invitation instead.

So from where I'm sitting, whether with friends, acquaintances on staff or beside total strangers, in the balcony or in a folding seat in the atrium, what matters is knowing that God's there and about to rock somebody's world ... and not whether I know the name of whoever's there beside me.
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I've got the attention span of a fly turned loose near the dessert table at an outdoor bar-b-q and if you're like me, grew up bored witless in church, thought worship music was borrowed from funeral parlors, hated dressing up to "look holy" and "fit in" or thought that preaching taught straight from The Bible was irrelevant, dusty and outdated, don't give up yet because there is something more... Just Go One Time.