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BY REV. MANDY SAYERS

Like most people, I experience God in all the usual places: a natural landscape, a beautiful choral piece, a high-energy praise song, or the quietness of prayer. This month, however, God has led me to realize that the Divine can also be encountered in more unexpected ways.

I have just gotten home from a brief unplanned stay in the hospital. I brought everything home with me that I took in, save a little bit of tissue heretofore known as “my appendix.” Even the name of the body part sounds temporary, an afterthought of our Maker, a sort of dangling postscript.

It’s as if God said, “Well, I’ve put in a colon, not a period or question mark. It feels incomplete down there. I know! I’ll put in .... an appendix.” It’s not the main plot, but a divine rhetorical flourish, like the swirls on the S’s in the Declaration of Independence.

This little appendix is (or in my case was) the least impressive resident of a dark, mysterious place called the abdominal cavity. It’s an appropriate name for a place loaded with blobs of vitally important tissue, all working in the engine room of our body, so that our brain can think great thoughts, from a love poem or a great novel to “Where in the world are Nathan’s shoes NOW?”

This is the place where the utterly mundane and miraculous live, where breakfast is processed and babies are made. It’s no wonder Dickens had Scrooge dismiss the appearance of Marley’s ghost, saying “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

A couple hundred years ago, people even talked about love as a thing that resided in your “gut.” We see it in one of my favorite hymns: “Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown.” It’s based on Jacob wrestling with an unknown opponent, asking what his/her/its name is; Charles Wesley writes it in the first person, because we all wrestle with who and what God is. At the end, for Jacob, it is a divine being that gives him a blessing, a new name, and a limp. For Wesley and for us, it is God revealed in Christ, “whose nature and whose name” is love:

’Tis Love! ’tis Love! Thou diedst for me!
I hear Thy whisper in my heart;
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
Pure, universal love Thou art;
To me, to all, Thy bowels move; (ahem)
Thy nature and Thy Name is Love.

As I sit here, somewhat gingerly, I am led to contemplate my good Maker, whose nature and whose name is love. I’m grateful for the blessing of health, for the joys of being named “child of God,” and even for my little “limp,” a reminder of the precious gift of being “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14), and the equally God-given gifts of medicine and care.

And as to my own little “appendix,” if you have stomach pain that starts in the middle and becomes localized to the right side, don’t overly Google it. “Trust your gut,” that place where so much resides, and get thee to an ER. You will be glad you did, no matter what it turns out to be.

The Rev. Mandy Sayers is a pastor at Covenant Point-Lakeside Cooperative Parish in Waldorf.