Richard should have heard your sermon yesterday; but he was at the shore. What a downer! For him and you.

Then there was the attendance chart left on the back pew. It would have been better for you if you had not passed that way at the close of Sunday. "Why did I have to see those figures?" Right. The bottom line was not all that encouraging.

By the way, you may as well forget Manny's promise to mow the lawn because his family just left for a two week vacation. Already the hay is blowing in the winds at the church's front.

And as far as the offerings were concerned, just pray to God that August does not hit the skids again this year. If this is what it is like this past Sunday, what will it be when everyone decides the beach looks like a willing mission field for evangelism tract-hand-outs?

Plus: your eighteen year old promised to be in both Sunday school and worship, yet as you scanned the congregation you could not spy your own's rumpled shirt nor uncombed head of hair for the life of you.

You say there are only 50-some Sundays in a year. And at each one's dawn you hope for at least one visitor who will sign the book and stay. Or--miracles of marvels --maybe even a whole family will walk through those front doors--a real, live family in an age when whole families are becoming relics akin to dinosaur teeth.

So you think you feel badly about all this?

What do you think He feels? He planted that sermon for Richard in your heart. Yet Richard did not show to hear it.

He is just as sensitive to the amassing front grasses as you. After all, it is His property.

As for those passing out tracts on the sands, do you not recall that He knows exactly where each one of those negligents is on His holy day, from His holy house?

As for families, whose heart breaks the most when it comes to standing alongside history, taking in the capsizing of one home after another?

After all--and you already know this, but it is so hard to click it in sometimes--it is finally His work. You are but waterboy.

Therefore, when you are in one of those Monday moods, consider that you just might be helping Another carry the load of a weary way.

God is personal. He has feelings. He cries, experiences sorrow, is grieved. God can be hurt to the quick. Therefore, God reaches out for a friend.

Recall God-in-Him when He wondered, "Will you too turn away?" When He pleaded with someone He thought He could trust: "Before a rooster crows, you will let me down one more time."

It was this God who hung from a tree--in spasm, not able to push away the bugs buzzing around the dried blood on his forehead. Yet beneath His limp legs was but a feeble lot who bothered to show for worship.

Even when he birthed His ecclesia at the Pentecost Festival, only l20--out of thousands upon thousands gathered for the gala--bothered to bend knees for a prayer meeting in an upper story flat.

So, you see, God has to handle Monday moods too. In fact, consider yourself honored: when you feel low on Mondays, you are helping your Friend carry His broken heart.

I know that someone told you that you must paste that Smile Face on your mug shot all the time in order to be the jolly pastor of the flock. "Happy times are here again" and all that.

Yet if anyone knows that to be a crock, you do.

Then why is it that when you long to be "life abundantly", there are times when you are the weeping prophet?

Because, on those days--frequently Mondays--God Himself is tenderly reaching out to you, His companion, asking you to help Him cry over Sundays.

Will you then cry with Him--knowing that such heavy moods can be the gift of God?

Printed in the May l998 issue of ALLIANCE LIFE.