OUR MOST READ BLOGGER since 2022 is back with the sixth of a series sharing more of her story. This month’s reflection is on how opportunities can come in surprising guises.

In the Affirmative is a monthly blog from Open Table member Wendy Young who shares her life, thoughts and experience as a queer Christian in Britain. We’d love to hear from you, too: Wendy invites readers to add their responses and reactions as we build community together. You can read the rest of the series here.

Hello! Welcome back for instalment number six of the story of someone a lot like you. What we have in common is that:

1. We have a relationship with and a deep love for God

2. We identify as LGBTQIA+ (or are allies of our friends who do).

(If you don’t fit these categories, you’re still more than welcome to read on, but understand my target audience will be different from you).

This is where we meet each other, and I hope that something about my story will remind you of something about yours. I believe it is in the sharing of our stories that we find our voices and our love for one another.

When I was 20, I got my first real job. I was a receptionist at a spa in the mountains just outside of town, and the pay was mostly live-in accommodation and food. It was exactly what I needed, and it happened so matter-of-factly that I can still hardly believe it. They gave me the job straight after my interview and I moved out of my parents’ house within a week.

Living and working in a hotel and spa in the mountains meant sleeping in the same kind of room that guests paid dearly for and eating food cooked by the same chef they were singing the praises of to their friends!

As well as making spa bookings, my responsibilities included looking after the music that was piped into every room, choosing what oil to drop into the essence burners hidden in corners, and walking the hotel grounds picking leaves and flowers to decorate the treatment rooms. The groundskeepers would tell me what was in abundance and what to leave alone for a bit, and I’d walk back up to the spa with arms full of bamboo as tall as me, or many massive bright white arum lilies, or a basket filled with hibiscus flowers if all else was off-limits. I loved making the spa look, sound, and smell beautiful. I took equal pleasure in clearing up the hundreds of wet towels as I did in rolling up the fluffy clean ones that came back from the laundry.

On days off, I would sleep until lunchtime and sing loud pub songs with the other employees deep into the night, after most of the guests had gone to bed. Sometimes I would hitch a ride into town to visit my parents in the little hotel van when it went for supplies. It was so easy and suited me so perfectly that it would have taken a rather large spanner in the works to disrupt my contentment.

After a year of this bliss, I had learned to do various spa treatments and started taking much more responsibility for the general running of the spa, hoping to become manager one day. I was enjoying both my own company and spending time with the other live-in employees, and I felt no need to earn more or do more. My parents were thrilled with how settled and happy I was, after worrying about me for many years.

On especially busy weekends, staff from our sister spa in the city would come to help us out. One morning, I was filling a display cabinet with new products from Bali, exquisitely packaged in little bamboo triangles, stacking them in a pyramid. Suddenly a woman’s voice right behind me said, ‘You’re being too pedantic, just scatter them!’ And that’s exactly what she did: she knocked over my carefully constructed display, the contents landing haphazardly. It looked stunning and I knew my life was about to change forever.

The attraction was instant. I knew I would willingly swap my contentment for the tumult falling in love can bring. I hadn’t been looking for a change but it presented itself to me in a way I couldn’t ignore.

We often can’t imagine what the next chapter of our lives is going to be. Certainly for me, this is how it has always been and my relationship with God follows the same (non-) pattern. Just when I think things are ticking along fine and I can predict what will happen next, I get a surprise. I like it; God knows me well enough not to let me get bored with too much predictability.

It’s an interesting process, the interaction between nature and nurture which develops each of us into the unique being we are. It makes me smile to think that it wasn’t only moving house too many times as a kid that made me this restless; part of the equation is that God made me and loves me like this.

Every six weeks or so, we have a Gathered Grace service at church, which my wife and I do our very best NOT to miss, because these are informal, charismatic services where we make it even more obvious than usual that we are a church where everyone is welcome, not in spite of but in celebration of our different genders, expressions of sexuality, identities and levels of mental and physical health.

The music on these evenings is more in the charismatic style than the traditional or even modern Anglican style, and we both love it! Just like I didn’t expect someone to turn up at the spa and send my life into a totally different direction, we didn’t expect what happened in church: the person leading the music on these Gathered Grace evenings joined the general church rota of musicians and volunteered to lead the music at all-age services!

So this month, my wife and I attended the one service in every month that we tend to avoid: All Age Sunday. Instead of the kids leaving the service to go into other parts of the building for their age-appropriate groups, we all have church together. Rather than a 15-minute serious and thought-provoking sermon, the message is a shorter, more interactive time of exploring a Bible passage together, often with a game of would-you-rather or a humorous video starting us off. There are large activity tables where kids can build Lego or draw and paint, and their creations are usually brought up to the front for all to see. It is a noisy, busy service and, because we’re both quite prone to sensory overstimulation, we usually stay at home on these Sundays.

But with this unexpected shift in the combination of variables, suddenly it became attractive to us. We were so glad we went! Yes, it was slightly chaotic around the edges where the kids were just being themselves, expressing their energy and exuberance at full volume, but we were also able to enjoy an excellent message and, of course, wonderful music.

I’d like to challenge you to be open to these shifts in the equilibrium. When we are very stuck in our ways - of praying, singing, reading the Bible, or communing with God and with each other - we can really miss it when the opportunity is no longer there. In my experiencethough, it is when we start examining these surprises that we notice how stunning the new pattern that emerges can be.

These surprises don’t necessarily have to make changes that last forever. The new relationship that started that day in the spa, with a woman who turned up out of the blue and knocked over my product display, lasted for 12 years then had to come to an end. Maybe one day the gifted musician will leave town and the all-age services will go back to being the week we skip church. These surprises, however, CAN make changes that show us something we shouldn’t miss out on.

Don’t miss out. God has wonderful things in store for you! Until we meet again, look out for them…

Wendy