He told me he had stopped going.
Not over the doctrine or the worship style, and nothing had happened with the pastor. He had stopped going because every Sunday, without fail, someone would find him in the foyer before the service or over coffee afterwards and ask the question.
So how is work going?
And he would feel the familiar tightening in his chest. The quick calculation of how much to say and how much to hide. The performance of a normal answer to a question that, for him, was not normal at all. Work was not going. Work had not been going for a long time. Work was the thing he thought about at three in the morning when his mind would not stop, the word at the centre of a web of shame and exhaustion he had been carrying alone for longer than he wanted to admit. Church had become the place where he had to perform the answer most often, so he stopped going.
The people asking were not being unkind. They were doing what people do in foyers, making conversation and filling the space between the end of the sermon and the drive home. The question was not even thoughtless, really. It was the default, the social script that gets run on Sunday mornings because nobody has written a better one.
But for someone carrying something heavy, whose anxiety has a particular shape and for whom certain questions land like weights rather than pleasantries, the default script can make church the most exhausting room of the week instead of the most restoring one.
Jesus said, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). That is close to the centre of what the gospel claims to be offering. When the foyer becomes a place where you have to perform wellness, something has gone genuinely wrong, even where nobody meant any harm by it.
Your instinct to protect yourself is not a failure of faith. You are allowed to find church hard for reasons that have nothing to do with God.
The question is not whether you can go back to performing wellness on Sunday mornings. It is whether some version of church community might be survivable. A midweek home group. A service you can slip into and out of without the coffee hour. A single person you trust, once a fortnight, who already knows the answer to the work question and does not ask it. None of that is a lesser form of church. It is the church finding a shape that fits the person who needs it.
And the God you are trying to reach on Sunday mornings is not waiting for you to have a better answer before he draws near. He is not checking your employment status. He knew what you were carrying before you walked through the door. "The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit" (Psalm 34:18).
Not close to the put-together. Not close to the ones with the good answer in the foyer.
Close to the brokenhearted. That includes you on the hard Sundays and on the ones you spent at home, on the mornings you made it to the back row and the mornings you could not get out of bed.
You do not have to have an answer for the work question. The road is long. You are not walking it alone.
