Where Love Finds Us
Sunday mornings are hard—
when it’s time to go to church.
Only, there’s no church.
Not one that feels like home, at least.
I still wake up with the old rhythm pulsing in me: the quiet coffee before service, the rush of getting ready, the faint hum of expectation. But here, in this new country, there’s nowhere to go.
The air smells of salt and sunlight. The bells ring somewhere far away, belonging to someone else’s community. And I sit with the ache of it all—
wanting to belong, not knowing where.
These days, I don’t often meet God where I was first taught to look for Him.
Not in the perfect quiet time or the planned devotion or the shiny places that smell of certainty.
More often, He slips in while I’m rinsing dishes.
In the way light moves across the tablecloth.
In the tired laugh of a friend.
In the silence that settles after tears.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped looking for God in the polished and started noticing Him in the plain.
At the public pool.
On the sidewalk.
In the hum of a grocery line where strangers gather to give what they can.
Maybe this is what love has always done—
shown up where we least expect it.
In the middle of things.
In the muddle and the middle.
I used to think faith meant brightness—
joy that never cracked, praise that never faltered.
For a long time, church was a happy place,
a place that knew how to celebrate but not how to sit in sorrow.
But life came, as it does, with its breaking and its leaving and its long nights of silence.
And in those seasons, I found myself drawn to a different kind of God—
one who weeps.
A God who grieves.
A Savior who knows loss not as theory, but as memory.
And maybe that’s why I recognize Him more clearly now—
not in the triumph, but in the tenderness.
Not in the noise, but in the nearness.
I was told Jesus is the answer,
and I believe He is.
But answers alone can feel hollow
when there’s no body beside you to hold the question.
When the joy is sung too soon, before the lament has had its breath.
I love the body of Christ—it’s still mine, even when I can’t find my seat in it.
I just haven’t yet found a church where I feel safe enough to bring my whole, unedited heart.
So I’m still praying, still holding that longing before God, still believing He cares about my ache to belong.
Moving here has made that ache louder.
Relocation has its own kind of grief—
one that doesn’t have a funeral.
The streets are foreign, the language still stumbles on my tongue,
and some days I wonder if God followed me across the sea.
But then, while I’m stirring soup, I feel it—
a small mercy, like warmth in my chest.
And I think—surely God is here too.
Here, in my living room.
In my bathroom, where I cry in the morning.
In my car, when I whisper prayers on the drive home.
Here with me, on this walk, in bed as I sleep, in the kitchen tonight when I cook dinner for one.
He’s not waiting for me to show up in a pew.
He’s sitting right here in the middle of my life,
listening to my heartbeat and calling it holy.
Maybe this is why I keep setting tables—both literal and spiritual—
because I need to believe love still finds us here.
That grace is not something we chase,
but something that sits down beside us when we finally stop running.
And maybe this is what The Table has always been about—
making room for the God who meets us in the mess and the mercy alike.
Because love often finds us not in the grand gestures,
but in the gathering itself—
in soup shared between friends,
in stories whispered over candlelight,
in the small mercy of being met right where we are.
So if your faith feels quieter these days—
less certain, but somehow more tender—
you’re not losing God.
You might just be finding Him again,
right where love has always been hiding:
in the small mercies,
the gathered silences,
and the honest middle of things.
And tonight, as light moves once more across the tablecloth,
I think—
maybe this is where love keeps finding me.
A gentle note before you go
Sometimes I write these reflections as a way to listen—
to trace the shape of what love is doing in the middle of my own becoming.
If words like these meet you somewhere in your own quiet, I’d love to keep walking together.
You can join me for Letters from the Middle—
monthly notes of story, prayer, and pause for those learning to live from the in-between.
Each one is a small table set with honesty, hope, and the gentle reminder
that love is still finding us, right where we are.