Yearning for Both Silence and Connection

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about my desire for more silence and then went off to my non-silent Sunday.  In fairness, I should note that I could have gotten out of the house earlier and gone to my church's more meditative service.   But that service still has a lot of talking, even for a service that's a half hour.  And there's rarely a Sunday where my spouse would be awake and ready for an 8 a.m. service.

I go to the 9:45 service for several reasons:  some of my friends go to this service, and I like the arts aspect of it.  I go to the 11:00 service because my spouse is part of the choir and because I have friends at that service.

Occasionally I think of other approaches to worship services that I think could work at our church, but we've already got 3 services.  To be honest, we don't really have enough worshippers to support three services, much less the others I might dream up.

But though we might not have a large enough congregation to support every endeavor we can dream up, there are gifts to be found in our smallness.  One is that I know lots of the congregation.  Some I know deeply, others on more of a surface level.  One reason why it's hard to think of switching services is that I'd lose some of the connections.

Maybe I'm not really yearning for silence at all.  Maybe my yearning for silence is really a yearning for something else--to get rid of all the distractions, so that I can focus on what matters.