Shove Chapel

Last night I went with a friend of mine, Sarah, and her boyfriend Kurt to pick up dinner at Pita Pit and then to Shove Chapel (pronounced with a long O) to eat said pita (greek chicken, spinach, mushrooms, tomato, olives, pickles, sprouts, feta cheese & taziki sauce) and to play/enjoy worship music.  I wish everyone I love could experience Shove Chapel.  Sarah says she doesn’t feel the same about this, but I think the place just feels holy.  I know it’s the décor.  Our Christian God is just as welcome there as Allah or Buddha.  They call it a chapel, and it has all the markings and symbols of a cathedral.  However, it hosts whatever group wants to meet there for any reason:  meditation, higher learning, yoga, anything really.  So I know it’s the stone floors,  long pews, domed ceiling, rosette windows, communion table, and massive decorative/functional pipe organ that cause this effect in me.  Still, I walk in and want to whisper and kneel.

 

So anyway, at the front of this place, up on the platform behind the communion table and between two sets of green velour padded altar boy seats is a black grand piano.  That’s where we sat.  We scooted and angled the altar boys seats in where we wanted them, and I found they encourage some seriously correct posture!  Sarah played piano.  Kurt played guitar, and I mostly sat there listening to the beauty created.  I feel so inept sometimes, no instrument in my hands.  But mostly I just enjoyed.  I got to look at the high painted ceiling and try to figure out the patterns that were obviously there but had no apparent meaning to me.  I got to occasionally add in a different line of harmony than was already being used, but most of the time Sarah was already singing the only harmony part I could hear. 

 

I prayed for a long time that God would gift me with being able to hear harmony because I couldn’t.  Now I can (thank you, Abba!) but can rarely hear two different harmony parts.  Good for me that I don’t mind listening to Sarah’s beautiful, different, woodwind-sounding voice.  I don’t know who WOULD mind.  Blows me away.

 

Anyway, I don’t have much else to say about it other than how great it was just to sit down with like-minded (hearted) people and love the Lord in my favorite way, through music.  It brought me back to evenings at the UKC house in Cape Coral when Zach would pull out his guitar and people just worshipped in whatever way they wanted:  on their face, pacing and praying, journaling, sleeping in His presence.  This was a little more choreographed, as some of the songs were just being learned and worked on, but still, it felt like an old friend come to visit.  How great.