I go to a small church on Capitol Hill. Each week 20 of us sit in the back dining room of a pizza place, sing a few songs, and read through a few verses of the Bible. The pastor, Ed, is also a counselor, so a typical Sunday usually involves some form of discussion about how we feel about what he just read.

He asks the same thing at lunch, when it’s just the two of us.

“How are you doing with all of this?” he asks. “Your story haunts me. Really. It haunts me.”

Ed is surprised I go to church, considering the betrayal I’ve dealt with from it in the past. The truth is, I still don’t want to. I started going back to church every week- most weeks anyway- because I’m bored by people that just give up, by people that think fleshing this stuff out can be done in solitude. I wish it could be. It can’t. I started going to church because I was getting bored with me.

He asked if I ever wanted to be a leader in a church again, or to teach.

“I should probably just want to be there first,” I said.

“Do you still want God?”

I told him I want to want God, that I can still feel the truth in my chest, but a lot of times I really just wish I didn’t believe any of it.

Right now Ed is teaching through Galatians. Ed likes to talk about how the gospel is both the most offensive message told to man and the most comforting. About how we’re all fucked up beyond belief, and even though there is no hope for us, there is. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much effort and sweat we expend, we just can’t do it on our own.

“We were set free by love,” he said. “And for love.”

I like thinking about that.

Love so great it can mend a relationship, or ease the grip of resentment. Love so great it can bring life from death.

Last week Ed talked about our responsibility to each other, to bear one another’s burdens – not to take them away, but to walk with those who are burdened. I don’t like thinking about that. I like doing things on my own.

But there’s this great verse at the end of Galatians that says the only thing that matters is the new creation, and even though I spend so much effort being something new, I’m not very good at it.

Some mornings, before the haze burns off and the city wakes up drenched in dew, I walk through my neighborhood, make a right on Denny and march east up Capitol Hill. At Broadway, the pulse of heavy machinery digging the tunnel for the light rail can be heard beyond the fenced off pit, and the half-empty 43 bus passes by on its way downtown. On clear days, usually during the summer, I can look west from here, past the Space Needle, across the sound, dotted with ferries, and see the snow resting on the peaks of the Olympic mountains, but this time of year the top of the Space Needle is floating on fog. While I was walking, I thought about the things Ed had been teaching: “We were set free by love. And for love. We’re supposed to bear one another’s burdens, and let others help shoulder the weight of ours.”

I stopped at my favorite sidewalk coffee stand, ordered, and started to walk back home.

I thought about another story Ed mentioned in church a couple of weeks ago – the story of Lazarus, how he walked out of a tomb when Jesus called his name, recently dead and now alive. I thought about the confusion he must have felt, feeling his lungs expand with that first new breath, and the blood rush into his legs as he stood. My favorite part of the story was him leaving what I picture to be a tunnel in the side of a hill, stepping into fog, still wrapped in clothes of death. Alive, yes, but still in the clothes of death. And Jesus tells those watching to unbind him. Let him go. Set him free. It’s easy to picture Jesus standing there, outside the tomb, calling his name, leaning just a little bit forward at the waist, like the conductor of an orchestra, palms held up, as if in the midst of the chaos of death he was holding a single note, teasing the life of Lazarus, until – with the help of the rest of the orchestra – it became everything it could.

A new creation.

I feel that confusion of Lazarus, too. Like there’s new breath inside me, something better, something pure, but I’m still tangled in the wrappings of what I was, longing to be undressed.

I wish it was something I could do on my own.

I wish that I didn’t need my wife to help unwrap what was wound around me when my first wife slept around. I wish I didn’t need my new friends to help unwrap the linen of resentment I let my old friends tighten when they asked me to leave their church.

I wish none of it took so long to unravel. Mostly, I wish it wasn’t their job to help.

I think life would be better if we didn’t need relationships to heal broken relationships, or need the church to heal the sins of the church, but we do. And even though I’m pretty good at taking care of others, I suck at letting them be there for me. But the times I feel like I’m closest to God is when I’m loving someone else, and denying them the chance to be a part of my healing is denying them the opportunity to be a part of God. I’m trying to remember that this week. I’m hoping to get to the place where I actually enjoy going to church, or at least enjoy being a part of it.