Old South finally sold its sanctuary building, after a very long, arduous process. The closing was yesterday.

In anticipation of the sale, I spent some time alone in the sanctuary Tuesday afternoon. I had a Spotify playlist of traditional Protestant hymns playing on my phone. I sat in a pew. I listened, prayed, reflected, and remembered. It didn’t take long before I found myself looking around and remembering where certain people sat in the sanctuary, especially those who are no longer with us.

I remembered Bud, Alice, Louise, Harmon, Jane, Bob, Al, Judy, Debbie, Alta, Joyce, Barbara, Jim, Peter, along with others. I also remembered some of those people who are still living, but no longer part of the Old South community, many of them having moved away. As I continued to sit and listen, it came to me very clearly that I was sitting in an empty room. A lovely room. A beautiful and quiet location. A space that evoked various memories. But, no longer a meaningful place.

What gave that space substance and significance are the people with whom I shared that space, the people who have been my companions on the journey of faith in a community that continues to strive to be part of the story of God’s people, with Christ as our guide, teacher, and Savior.

In the protracted nature of the process to sell the sanctuary building, I had worried that I would have a similar experience to the drawn-out nature of the selling of my house in Waterville, when my husband and I decided to live full-time in a nearby lakes area. By the time we sold the house in Waterville, I had come to dislike that house quite a lot. Sure, it held important memories of raising our family there, but I had a lot of negative feelings too. Those negative feelings took root and developed over the long period of time it took to get to a closing.

As I sat in the sanctuary on Tuesday afternoon, I did not experience anything similar to the selling of my house, in terms of discovering a lot of negativity. Instead, I had more of a feeling of completion, that the space had served the community and had served it well for a long time. But it’s work was done, at least in terms of its relationship with the Old South community as a community of faith. It had become a burden and a drain of resources and energy that took us away from what is important about gathering together in Jesus‘s name and as people who seek to live as God‘s people in this time and place.

The building served us, and our predecessors, well, but our Christian witness now moves on in a new way, a way that has already started to make itself known. May Old South continue to be blessed with grace and courage to live in faith, through joys and challenges, and to share God’s love with reckless, and wondrous, abandon.