We visited the Vineyard Church in West Palm Beach this Sunday, and were so warmly welcomed that we felt as though we had been there forever.  There is something wonderful about entering the Father’s house and discovering siblings whom we have not yet met.

It was not the music.  It was not the preaching…or the praying…or the free style of worship that drew us.  It was the sense of relationship – relationship with God, relationship with one another, and relationship that welcomed and loved the strangers.  We had not been there before, but we knew that we were at home.

Most likely, we will not make that our every-Sunday-church-home, but it is one to which we will return frequently, especially when we are need of love and hope and encouragement.  When the pastor’s wife, Maria, spoke words of faith about a concern that I am carrying, I felt the brush of angels’ wings.  When Pastor Doug later, independently affirmed that hope, I knew with steady certainty that God is in control.  They are blessed people, sharing blessed hope with a blessed congregation.

Maria said, as she described the group who gathers, “We are a congregation of misfits.”  I smiled, because God’s people in this world, with citizenship in a world beyond this one, are always misfits.  That is why God’s saints are always on safari, moving toward the promised land.