A Communion Story

As most of you know, Ryan and I have been attending an Anglican Church as of late. There are a few things a little bit different there than from our previous church experiences. One of the things is that the Communion is practiced differently. Instead of the elements being passed around, each person walks to the front to receive them, first the bread and then the wine. We have gotten fairly used to this practice, but encountered something a little different this morning. We were sitting in our chairs, awaiting our row's turn to go to the front. I usually like to spend this time in prayer and dwelling on the act of Communion, which I had been this morning, but as the row in front of us went, I began preparing myself to get up. In other words, I was just kind of looking at the front of the church, waiting... and something quite funny caught my eye. See, just before we even begin even talking about Communion each week, the children are all brought in from their kid's service. So, there's a lot going on and all of the kids go up with their parents to partake in Communion. Well, they can partake or not partake (for the ones who don't, I'm assuming the ones who have yet to receive Christ themselves, walk up to the front with their parents and cross their arms over the front of their bodies. When the pastor sees this, he bends down and prays over them-a beautiful thing really)..anyway, the particular kids who caught my eye were a little bit older and were two brothers who were both partaking. One of the boys got to the wine first, but the other (younger) brother was close behind. As the chalice bearer was walking over to get some grape juice for the first boy, the younger brother kind of ran up behind/beside his brother. The older brother proceded to shove (and hard, I might add) his younger brother out of the way...like he was afraid the chalice bearer might give the juice to his brother before him. As I watched this interaction, I chuckled to myself. But then, I started thinking a little about it. And I thought that it was a great picture of how we can be sometimes...almost as if we are subconsciously afraid that God might run out of grace for us, so we don't want to share it with anyone, when this is actually the complete opposite the message of the gospel. We cling to the grace God has so richly poured on our lives, but look around us with eyes that see others as not worthy to receive that same grace...when really, we aren't worthy ourselves, by any means! The beautiful thing about the gospel IS that God sent Christ for the redemption of the whole world, that there really is enough for everyone-even for that one that doesn't deserve it in your own eyes... because when you really look deeply at that person, you might end up seeing something quite unnerving--it's actually you.