I’m telling the children in Kindergarten class the story of Hudson Taylor over the course of several weeks. I started a couple weeks back asking the kids what they do after dinner if they’re having family time.

A lot of them said that they would watch a movie and eat popcorn.

I explained to them that when Hudson Taylor was a little boy, there was no such thing as a movie. The room responded with an audible gasp.

Not only did they have no movies, they had no screens to watch movies on. Blank looks of shock.

Not only that. They didn’t have electric lights. Their home was lit only by candles. The thing we do when we lose power, light candles.

But it was that first revelation that seemed to shock them the most: a world with no movies.

A key part of my growing up years involved going to the movies. My wife attended a church that didn’t allow its members to go to the movies. She could watch them when they moved to television, so it must have been something to do with the act of going to a movie theater.

But for me, movies held a special place in my childhood and student years.

In college, I discovered the arthouse theaters, smaller and more rundown than the big movie palaces downtown or the up-and-coming multiplexes with multiple screens. Going to the movies in the arthouse was like watching a graphic novel—watching and reading at the same time, seeing another part of the world.

I remember watching a black and white subtitled movie that ended with the protagonist’s revelation of his own failures and a sense of peace. The silence of us viewers, stunned as we sat collectively, and thought of a life not lived well and about to end. When the movie faded to black, ours was not a gasp but just a sort of sad sigh, yet we all did it together.

Just like the Kindergarteners did together, with their audible gasp of shock when they thought of a world with no movies.

Or the shared experience of laughing out loud at a joke at the same time as a hundred other people you don’t know.

The dark room of flickering lights. Opening nights in a theater with fans can bring cheers, screams and much applause as the long-awaited premiere begins or when strangers in a dark room discover for the first time the unthinkable—Darth Vader reaching out to Luke and saying “Son.” Audible gasp!

A shared experience with those around you in a theater makes it different than a streaming service you watch alone, different from watching alone but more like, going to church every Sunday.

Journeying through the Bible with others in church is like the shared religious experience of moviegoing, only better. A genre-bending epic love story with sci-fi horror elements featuring the living and the dead, a small personal film where I sometimes need to read subtitles to get it.

Sunday comes and there I always go to gather with my friends and the people I don’t yet know. We sing together. Where else can you do that? A man will get up and talk, yet not his words but the very thoughts of Christ. There will be a nugget of gold, hidden in pages of solid rock, soaring out across the room, penetrating my soul. Prayers will go out and up to places I could never reach alone. We will sing together again. It can get personal fast. A man who knows me well might ask about my son. Another is just back from a hospital stay, and he looks remarkably well. We meet new people. We greet old friends we haven’t seen in a while. On the way out, I stop and pray with a friend. There we were in the parking lot, together, reaching the hand of God for help. Sometimes we just need help, right then and there. Prayer is prayer, but praying together is different than praying alone.

Back to movies, I remember hearing someone once ask, “What if Jesus comes back and he finds you in the movie theater?”

I know now that I was supposed to feel shame, but at the time, I didn’t understand the question. Maybe I still don't. If Jesus came back, when he comes back, who cares about the movies or anything else? Wherever we are, Jesus finds us snd will find us.

No matter the kind of week I’ve had, I am welcome in church. Last week I took off my shoes and shirt and put on a sort of turban and robe. Pretending to be Peter just released from jail, I asked the children if I should still tell people about Jesus even if it might mean going back to jail. Yes, they said. It was a hard answer, yet they knew it was right. I was touched these little ones hesitantly answered yes.

We call out to the Father, the Son stretches out his arms on the cross and then to the sky and finally reaches out to us in love, the Spirit there, ever-present guide and friend. At church, I’m reminded he is already here with me, with us, in church or cinema or work or home. Wherever we go, he goes. Yes.

Anywhere else, with me and us, church and Jesus with us, every day, all night, closer than I dare dream, dear church, Jesus appearing in our midst. In the tempest on the sea he walks on the ocean ground to us, Is it a ghost? At moments we realize and see through the glass and we can’t help it—gasp—for what he is and the who and what is to come, the best place to be, he stays with us. We stay with each other, this boat against the roiling waves, an ark in the roiling storm, a ship in which Christ calls out “Peace. Be still.” And we catch our breath in the wonder and awe and breathe the audible gasp of the great peace of all he brings.

Still.