When we feel rotten, we want to avoid happy people. Laughing hyenas travel in packs; the depressed ones probably travel alone. Sometimes we just want to be alone and church is not a place where that is easily accomplished.
Often those who feel the worst avoid worship because they are convinced that everyone else is happy and no one knows the misery they are experiencing. No one who is struggling wants to hang out with people who are going to inevitably ask, “How are you?” Maybe they care, maybe they don’t, but when we are upset, we don’t want to be asked.
And so, we stay home. We go to the beach. We watch TV. We feign illness. And we void the very thing that God has created for hurting people.
Hearts that are chewed up and in trouble provide fertile soil for the gospel. Overturned earth is most ready for the seed. Sorrow breaks the hardness of our hearts and brings the possibility of healing most in view. And our Enemy does not want us to find that healing. So he whispers insistently, if not persuasively, “Stay home; you don’t want to be there. Not with THEM.”
When you feel rotten is, in fact, when you most need to be in worship. Go. Be there. And pray that the renewing dew will fall upon your broken heart.