There's more to worshipping God than page five and fifteen

I grew up believing that real worship of God meant going to church on Sunday and using an order of service from the hymn book that started on either page five or 15.  It was always the same.  The hymns were always in the same place.  The readings were done in the same order and there was always just one place for the sermon.

There was the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed and they always had a reserved spot in the service.  

When I got to a certain age I could recite all these without thinking and I could run through most of the liturgy in a way where my mouth would say the right thing, but my head would be someplace else.  I'd leave church thinking that was worship.

It was something that you never questioned while going to a parochial school and my aunts and uncles would rarely talk about it.  My uncles would shrug their shoulders and then change the subject and a few of my aunts would move into a mini-sermon about the holiness of what was done during the sermon.

In my teen years, I started to raise questions revolving around the service, particularly sermons.  I had to be among the first in my denomination to take notes to try and understand.  I tried to outline what pastors said.  I would ask.  I grew up feeling that my faith hadn't evolved enough to truly understand how it applied to my life or that I was just slow in the head to understand.