A slice of watermelon is representative of the whole watermelon. When you look at the slice, you can tell what the whole melon is like. A slice of krumkake does not come out of a sour cream raisin pie, nor does a slice of whole wheat bread come from a loaf of San Francisco sourdough. It would be unrealistic to expect any different. The whole determines what the slice is like.

Worship is a slice of life. It’s a celebration of what goes on during the whole week. You can’t expect to serve up a big wedge of German chocolate worship on Sunday when you’ve spent the week making cow pie. That would be unrealistic, to say the least.

Worship is something we do together as the people of God. If we don’t have a sense of belonging to that same family, the people of God, all week, then our worship is, to a certain extent, phony.

And yet, our expectations often continue as unrealistic. We come for an hour of highly charged spirituality hoping to gain energy to get us through another Godless week in the trenches. But it doesn’t work that way. Christianity is a way of life together, not a Sunday morning mirage divorced from Monday’s busy-ness. We come to thank God for another week of creation and to praise God for the guts to go on living together.

Until we realize this and make this a part of our heart, Sunday mornings would be better spent doing something useful.