It’s 8:00 AM, July 9, the day I’m actually writing this and I’m re-remembering the dream I awakened to just after 4:00 this morning.

In my dream I was walking around the outside of the storefront location of Columbus Mennonite Church. It was our second storefront since we’d left the Neil Avenue location near OSU and both of the storefront locations were in an old-fashioned outdoor shopping center, where the store’s expansive glass fronts a poorly-lit open, but weather-sheltered mallway.

The fluorescent-lighted 60’ x 60’ space was empty inside except for two people working—one was maybe Steve, but the other was definitely Al Bauman. Very large yellow-taped X marks were arranged in order, filling up all of the black carpet. I thought, “Hmmm, this space is slightly larger than the storefront space the church moved from around the corner and maybe that’s why we’d moved.”

When I awakened, I thought, oh, what an awful space! Why did we leave that beautiful stone and dark wood building on Neil Avenue and 6th for that? And then, really really slowly, I remembered we had moved 22 year ago from Neil to a church building on Oakland Park Avenue, a big building with many staircases and lighter wood and beautiful flower gardens outside. I walked through it in my head...the sanctuary, the bright kitchen, the Sunday school rooms, Edith’s smile.

After I dream, I nearly always take a minute to sit and wonder at the richness of imagery and creativity that lies in my brain that comes out in dreams. In this case, I’ll creatively interpret what I was dreaming too.

I think those large Xs on the black carpet in the storefront church in my head last night were the Zoom screens I see for church with all of you. It was the same intense focus of images in a squarish space, substituting for church. I’ve genuinely appreciated every shelter-in-place production CMC has done these months…Really, they are well done.

I think, though, that my brain was telling me that at some point it’s hard—even for a happily introverted person like me—to squash all of church experience into a brightly-lit squarish space that hangs out in the middle of my visually-distracting breakfast nook the way my dream’s storefront was hanging out there in the mallway.

I want you back. I just gotta say It. I want you all back.