mysterious ways

So, tonight we had our monthly youth service at St Mary's. You could tell God was moving: Gemma planned to do a talk on the tsunami and when we arrived at the church, there were newspaper clippings pinned on a board in the church as power points. The last thing she said in her talk was "What's stopping you?", in reference to people's unwillingness to pray about big disasters; in the back of the song sheet, Graeme happened to have written a message called "What's your excuse?" in reference to people's fear of acting out for God.

We were worshipping, a few of us girlies and Rob were leading, harmonies and acoustic guitar, v.nice. After a disagreement about who was meant to be leading, we prayed and decided to focus on worshipping rather than who was singing what, and we all sang together, which was lovely. Then, between songs, Gemma stopped us and said she had a word from God that someone in the group needed to 'let go'. I tried to avoid instantly applying the word to my own life, which is what I always do and it's invariably not aimed at me. Tonight though...

In the middle of "I can only imagine", I started crying. I'm not sure why, it felt like everything was catching up to me and I couldn't hold back everything I usually hold back. I cried like a baby for about 20 minutes solid, I couldn't stop. Gem and Lou prayed for me, and I was starting to calm down, when Stuart came over. He had a poem, he said, God had told him that someone at the service would need to read this poem. He fished it out of his notebook and handed it to me.

It was the poem that my granny had framed in her flat, the poem that me and my brother had desperately wanted to get hold of before they cleared out her belongings after her death. We never managed to get the poem, but on this night that I randomly started catching up on all the crying I've tried not to do for years, Stuart had that poem written down in his notebook and he gave it to me. I think I scared Stuart, I squeaked like some kind of rodent and slammed the book shut, and before you could say "Kleenex", I was off again.

He asked me, as did everyone, what was wrong. And I told him the truth. I don't know, I really don't know.

The funny thing was, people kept saying, "That's so weird, I've never seen you cry before, you're always so happy." Humour as a defence mechanism? Maybe it's about time I stopped that.

Maybe.