The Church on Maple Street

Every Sunday morning at 7:45, Luis Medina pulls his Ford pickup into the gravel lot of Grace Community Church in Dalton, Georgia. He arrives early — not because he has to, but because he wants to. He unlocks the front doors, starts the coffee, and switches on the sanctuary lights. By 8:15, he is sitting in the third pew, waiting.

Luis spent twenty-two years working the carpet mills, and for most of those years, Sunday was just another day. Then his wife, Elena, was diagnosed with lymphoma. The people of Grace Community showed up — with meals, with rides to chemo in Chattanooga, with prayers so persistent they wore grooves in heaven's floor. Elena survived. And Luis found something he never expected: a place where he actually wanted to be.

"I was glad when they said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord,'" the psalmist wrote. That gladness is not obligation dressed up in religious language. It is the real, bone-deep joy of someone who has discovered that the gathering of God's people is not a duty but a homecoming.

Luis will tell you plainly: "I used to think church was for people who had it all figured out. Turns out it's for people like me — people who got carried when they couldn't walk."

That is the heart of Psalm 122. The journey to worship is not a burden. It is the road that leads us back to the place where El Shaddai meets His people, binds them together, and gives them peace.