Grace and Beloved's ChurchSearch Week 2: Grace starts crying halfway to another new church and decides to come home instead

That says it all, essentially. I'm at a point where I don't want to walk into a new church looking all emo and snivelly and dishevelled, where I don't want anyone's first impression of me to be one of patronisingness or sympathy or pity or a pastoral care assignment. That's not to say that I'd never cry or get upset in front of church people (it's not something I have a great deal of control over, much of the time), but I want to do all I can to start off with people seeing me as thoughtful, intelligent and aiming to serve, affording me equality, crebility and respect. And so, at 10.23am, we returned home.

Beloved says that people in churches should learn to accept the fulness of one another's life experience and that if I'd gone into a service crying that it shouldn't have mattered. Jesus, from the look of the gospels, would undoubetdly agree. But I just don't want any more messy and [*Grace struggles to avoid use of a four-letter word*] church relationships. But the whole point of Christ's message of grace is that all our human relationships (whether inside or outside of church structures) will be messy and imperfect yet endowed with the potential for healing and joy. So if I cut myself off from other Christians because I fear their sympathy and their pity, then I'm cutting myself off from God, too. And yet, even knowing that, yesterday I continued to ealk home.

Ultimately, then, I'm concluding that perhaps the question of being inside or outside the church becomes a secondary one. Perhaps instead, it's about the quality of the relationships developed, and the way in which God and faith and community are expressed through those relationships. The nebulous evangelical concept of a personal and individual relationship with God is fine, but as Teresa of Avila points out, Christ has no body on earth but ours...

Once we were home, Beloved and I sat on the sofa eating leftover fruit salad. And Beloved said "I just want a way of worshipping where we can talk to people, where we can be with them."

Yes.