Show Up Anyway

Hebrews 10:19-25

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• let us hold unwaveringly to our confession that gives us hope
• we must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works
• we should not stay away from our assembly, as is the custom of some
• encourage one another, and this all the more as you see the day drawing near

Applying the Word to My Life:
It was about six years ago, but I remember walking into the room for my first youth ministry small group of high school guys. I was nervous and had no idea what I was doing, but when I looked around it was just a bunch of guys randomly selected to be in this room together - a handful of different school districts, a few small clusters who already knew each other, and not much else holding the room together. Whatever we were, nothing about us looked like community yet.

We met every week for four years, and I couldn't have told you, in any single week, that anything was changing. There were a lot of days where I wondered if we were learning anything at all, let alone forming a community. It just kept happening underneath whatever we were actually talking about that night - until senior year handed the group some real setbacks, and I watched guys who'd started out barely knowing each other's names sitting together, caring and praying for each other.

We want instant results, and when a room like that one doesn't feel like anything yet, the easy move is to write it off - just a random collection of people, not really an assembly, and either way not somewhere I belong. That's not a new problem. The writer of Hebrews was already telling his readers not to stay away from their assembly the way some of them already had. He's not describing attendance. He's describing exactly what I watched happen in that room - rousing one another to love and good works, not because anyone assigned it, but because years of just showing up gradually built whatever it took to do it.

I've watched the same thing happen at my own parish, on a much longer timeline. I used to walk in and sit down without knowing a soul in the building. Years of the same pews, the same Sunday, and now I can look around a crowded church and find people I know almost everywhere I turn. None of that was a plan. It was just showing up enough times for it to happen.

The assembly Hebrews is talking about doesn't feel like it's doing anything most weeks you show up for it. You don't leave Mass, or a Wednesday night group, thinking you just built something, but it is happening beneath the surface. When you give up and skip long enough, it starts to crumble, and then there's nothing there to catch you when a setback actually comes.

Nobody builds that kind of support by showing up once. It only exists because enough people kept showing up long enough to make a difference.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll show up for a gathering I could easily skip, and trust God to produce the growth that comes with it.