Hither by thine help I've come

Yesterday was second Easter, which means that it was the 10th liturgical anniversary of when I joined Christ Church Wellesley, the church I attended throughout college.

My first Sunday of college, in September 2012, I was too shy to call a local church for a ride, so I looked at the UMCs nearby and chose to visit the one that was closest on foot. By a very narrow margin, that was Christ Church. (I very rarely walked to church again because within a few weeks, half a dozen people had either given me a ride to/from church or had offered did.) I had no idea at the time where that walk would lead me. Christ Church was more than an order of magnitude smaller than the congregations in which I'd grown up, and it was struggling, though it took me the better part of a year to realize that. But it felt like home, and it came to feel like family.

CCUM taught me to bear weight. It taught me what it meant to live up to my mentorship vows in a church that needed me to do so. It was where I learned Taize songs, where I realized that I found more joy in teaching than in engineering, where the seeds of how I live as a queer person in the church were planted, where I became involved with the business and politics of the church and the Church, where someone first let me sing tenor in a choir, where I preached for the first time (and the second, and the third). It was where I learned what God's yes feels like.