From Despair to Praised

For some unknown reason, my brain occasionally works on a problem I didn’t know I had. Recently, I was puzzling over words and the word “praised” popped into my head. I bounced the word around a little bit, looking for another word that used all of the same letters, and I realized that “despair” used the same letters as “praised.” Interesting! Or perhaps not…

I have found that praise is the answer to those moments when I believe I am stuck and without hope. I have found that praise is the answer when I get down in the mouth and feel frustration. However, it usually takes something else to prod me into praise. It is not automatic. I have to choose praise before despair can be turned into praise! Or, if you want some more word play, I have to “parse” my “despair” until God is “praised!”

For a case in point, I have been noticing our decline in worship attendance for some time. We finally turned a corner following Covid and began growing again, but in the past couple of years, we reached a plateau, and while we still receive guests and visitors, our overall worship attendance has declined again. I am not a charismatic leader, nor am I a miracle worker, so I have been feeling down in the dumps about it.

Until… until I realized that we are not a Sunday morning church only! We have always had activities and groups beyond Sunday morning. Sometimes, those groups will feed our worship attendance, but not always. Likewise, I have read more than one article that says churches need to look beyond Sunday morning these days to see what God is doing. At the same time, many of us have been noting that we are growing older, all of us, and that is not a good recipe for the future.

But – all it takes is to look beyond our worship space and see what is happening in the other rooms and on Sunday evenings. On Sunday mornings, we have children in two or three rooms for Sunday school and the nursery, and on Sunday evenings, we are moving beyond twenty youth towards thirty. And one thing will be essential to turning those young people into strong members of our congregation – for us to get to know and engage with them
We have everything we need to turn despair into praise – all it takes is looking where God is moving rather than looking at where we want God to be moving!

It is my joy to praise God alongside you!