There is a lot of it, this ache called “woe”.

Hearts broken, bruised, confused and searching.  There is a huge lonely that goes with the sense of woe when the world feels too much and resources too small.

Sometimes people in a world of woe find themselves at church.  It is a safe place for the hurt to be spoken and the lonely to be stilled for a time.  There are no more answers to be had, perhaps, in such a place.  But there is this thing called sanctuary where communion with God is sought and the people of God are leaned into and woe is not a solitary lonely.

My father, who was a man acquainted with woe and a minister of the gospel, said that he prepared his sermons for the one person in the sanctuary who dragged themselves to church on Sunday because they had nowhere else to go.

And so it is with every-day worship that is church.  Every day, not just Sundays, we exist for those who drag themselves to church because there is nowhere else to go.

We know woe; in ourselves and in others and we exist as community in Christ to vanquish for a time the sense that woe is forever.

We’re there when woe is.