The Perfect Wedding Dress

I made a decision to be a follower of Christ at the tender age of seven, almost three decades ago now.  Decades that translate to so many seasons I've spent discovering His goodness, seeing my life transformed into His likeness.  So many years to watch how He works, tracing the patterns of His grace through time.

And for years I've been following a thread, tracking it from the fruit I see around me back to His heart.  Every time I see evidence of it, I am provoked to amazement, for how can He be this good? 

The fellowship of the believers.  The communion of the saints.  The church as the bride.  All names for the thread I've watched weave itself back and forth for years in the lives of those around me, producing fabric of indescribable beauty and incredible strength.

I noticed it for sure the first time on the mission field to Mexico at the age of sixteen, listening to Spanish speaking believers pray with fervency.  I didn't understand their words, but I had no problem joining my prayers to theirs, knowing the God we prayed to understood us both.

I saw it again the first time my husband and I attended a new smallgroup.  We sat with people we had just met and shared our revelations about Scripture, our questions about the same, and what we saw God doing in our lives.  We didn't know these people, yet they could relate to every word we uttered because He was doing the same in their own journeys.

I celebrated it in the Czech Republic when the wife of a pastor and I prayed together with the help of an interpreter, both of us hungering for the same things and desiring the same touch from God as we lived lives thousands of miles apart.  And again in Poland.  And again in Austria.  And again in Guatemala.  And again in Brazil.

I marvel at it when I pick up a book written by a believer who I will never meet and discover the questions I have asked have already been asked in his mind and the answers I have sought are being freely shared, for the Kingdom of Heaven is all about giving and receiving.

I stand in awe of it when I listen to a living room full of ordinary people pray over a family they have just met, their prayers specific and accurate not because of years spent with one another, but because their hearts are knit together by the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The fellowship of the believers. 

The communion of the saints. 

The church as the bride.

How beautifully He clothes her.

How grateful I am to have been woven in.