I’m headed to church with four little boys this Sunday morning. Scott is delivering a sermon to another church across town for his pastor friend so it’s just me and the boys driving to our service. The boys are burping and farting and fooling around in the car. I’ve told them to knock it off at least ten times. The four-year-old’s hair isn’t combed. It looks like it hasn’t been combed in a week. He’s missing his shoes and socks. I had to run back into the house to get them and find him a decent pair of pants since he’s always wearing his favorite jeans with holes in the knees.

I change his pants there beside the car in our driveway before we leave, and spit into my hands to smooth down his wildly curly hair. He fights me when I try to tame his hair. Then halfway to town, the four-year-old chokes on something, and then spits it out on the floor of the car, my parents’ FJ that I’m driving because our old Suburban is falling apart.

“What was that?” I ask his brothers sitting beside him while I’m doing my best to keep my attention on the road.

“An old French fry he found under his car seat,” says the ten-year-old.

The twelve-year-old in the passenger seat lets out another epic fart. He loves our dried fruit and eats it like crazy. His farts make me gag. “Please roll down your window,” I tell him, trying to hold my breath and talk at the same time. “If your dad was in this car you boys wouldn’t be acting this way.”

But dad isn’t in the car. It’s just me and the boys. During our drive, we come upon a sheep herd in the road. They are all pressed together. Needing each other. A sheep that goes it alone out here in the buttes is in danger with all the coyotes, but a sheep that stays surrounded by the herd is protected. And now I know it’s autumn, the sheep have returned to our neighborhood. They will stay the winter, watched by their shepherd, an old man in a small Toyota truck filled with bright-eyed sheep dogs.

Welcoming the sheep back does wonders for my weary soul, but by the time we get to church, my clothes are fumigated, the boys are in trouble with me, and I wonder why I put myself through this today. I stick the boys in their classes so they can learn about Jesus, and walk into the sanctuary feeling frazzled because I need Jesus.

Oh, how this mommy of five boys needs Jesus.

I spy one of my favorite people, Pauline, a widow in her 80’s sitting by herself near the front of the sanctuary. By the time I’m seated beside her, my mood has lightened. We hold hands for a short while. She squeezes my fingers several times in her soft, warm palm, and I feel her love and encouragement. The worship band opens with an old hymn. I love old hymns. Several songs later, and I am smiling, a real smile, not a fake church smile.

Pastor Doug is out of town, so Pastor Dan steps up, and preaches on hope. Hope is exactly what I need today. In front of me, a row of high school boys have crowded out the adults. This isn’t normal. Again and again my eyes stray to these boys. The day before I’d asked our 18 year old son to go to church with me to help with his little brothers since his dad wasn’t going to be there.

“Sorry, Mom,” Luke said. “I’m not going with you. I’ve got other plans.”

What’s new? When it comes to Sunday church, our oldest son always has other plans.

Luke attends church on Saturday nights alone only because his dad makes him go. We attend on Sunday mornings as a family, but it doesn’t quite feel like our family without Luke with us. I’m sure Luke leaves church on Saturday nights as soon as possible and heads off to find some fun. To shed our faith as fast as he can.

“My friends think you’re crazy religious,” Luke tells Scott and me the other day. Scott takes this as a compliment. My feelings are kind of hurt. I want to get to know Luke’s friends, want them to like me, and don’t think of myself as religious. I don’t like religion, but I love Jesus.

Those teenage boys in the row in front of me look like Luke. Confident and athletic. My eyes fill with tears. How I long for my son to stand in the front row like these boys eager to hear what the preacher has to say about the Savior this morning. But I understand why Luke doesn’t. Stand. There. Faith is a complicated thing, and I respect my son’s honest rejection of church right now. I’d rather have Luke be honest than pretend he’s something he’s not. Fake Christians do no one any favors.

And Luke has seen plenty of things in church that aren’t pretty. The truth is, Christians can sin with the best of them. Or worst of them, however you want to put it. Thirteen years practicing Evangelicalism has taught me this. Before the Evangelical Church, I was Catholic. I’ve gone to church all my life. And it feels like a battle, this quest to feed my soul, some days it really does.

Like all these invisible forces come out on Sundays to wreak havoc on hapless church-goers. Even our dogs freak out on Sundays. Before Scott was saved, when he first started attending church with me, the car would break down on Sundays. The electricity would go out on Sundays. We’d have a big family blow up on Sundays before church. Or after church. It was crazy. We called it the pre-church challenge. Or the post-church challenge. Getting to church and then safely back home was like running a gauntlet.

Years before this, I used to take Luke and his older sisters, Cami and Lacy, to church by myself. It was so hard. Children in the Catholic Church are expected to sit silently beside their parents in the pew no matter how small they are, but I’m a mommy on my own in church in those days because Scott won’t go to mass with us. Church is a pain in my rear, literally, with the hard wooden pew under my behind and the kids bouncing up and down beside me. And all mass does is leave me feeling like a failure because my kids can’t behave in church, especially my toddler son, Luke.

He won’t stop talking. Eats old gum from under the pews. Breaks his sisters’ crayons and tosses them at the old lady kneeling in front of us. I’m ready to wring his little neck, and I’m supposed to go to confession to confess this, but since my confirmation in the eighth grade, I’ve refused to do confession. Who wants to sit in a dark closet with a priest anyway?

When I walk through our door after church sixteen years ago, Scott says, “Well, I see the church lady’s home.”

I’m a haggard mess, dragging little, blond Luke into the house by the nap of his shirt collar. He’s so cute, but I’m ready to kill him, and my husband, too. “You should go to church with me just to make your children behave,” I tell him.

“I don’t know why you even bother with church. It puts you in a foul mood and ruins our Sundays,” Scott says.

We’ve had this running argument most of our marriage over Sunday mornings. My husband wants me to lounge in bed with him when he’s not off flying for the Army somewhere. Instead I get up, get the kids dressed, and go to church. Then come home frustrated that the kids acted like wild jackrabbits in church with old people giving me the bad eye because of my bad children.

And every Sunday I’m mad at my husband who swore when we married we’d raise our kids Catholic together, promising to go to church with me, but he never does. If nothing else, I’m persistent in making all of us suffer through all these crummy Sundays year after year. “It’s God day,” I say self-righteously. “We go to church!”

“And we all suffer,” Cami says. Our oldest daughter is in the second grade and already hates church.

“Christ suffered on the cross for your soul so you can suffer for an hour in church,” I tell her, but later when I sit and ponder Christ suffering for lost souls, I wonder about it. Do I really believe Jesus died on a cross to save my soul? Was he really God’s son? Who is God anyway? Everything I’ve learned about God in the Catholic Church scares me. So I start buying spiritual books because I need to know this God or give up on him.

Honestly, I’m ready to give up on Him.

Except for the God moments. They keep coming. Things I can’t explain, and don’t understand, but I know are supernatural experiences. So I keep going to church. Keep seeking a savior. Because I really need saving. And one day it happens. A miracle happens. I find Jesus. And my whole life changes. Did I find Him in church? Not exactly, but church helped. I think it helped.

Today, I can’t live without church. Is every Sunday perfect? Absolutely not. Some Sundays are still crummy with the pre-church or post-church challenge. Some Christians are crummy, too. But Jesus isn’t crummy. Jesus is amazing. This is why I go to church. Jesus is absolutely worth it.