church
-
she says.
Amie’s prayer in the car before the first service at Columbia Presbyterian Church: Dear Jesus, thank you for God’s church. Thank you for helping Daddy and his friends build us a church so we don’t have to keep going to new churches. Amen.
-
practice service.
We hesitated to call this Sunday’s worship service with our core group a “practice service” because of course such a thing doesn’t exist. There’s no “practice” in the family of God because the Holy Spirit is always with us and everything we do, whether it’s building sound panels or buying office furniture or tuning a guitar or texting a new friend, is real worship. But having said all of that, with the full knowledge that we are a garden and not a corporation, it still takes an enormous amount of work to gather for worship as a group. It takes knowing where the bathrooms are and whether the children’s space…
-
weekend.
We got home from PA on Tuesday evening, and somehow the succession of days since then has run together in a blur of craziness. Not so much crazy for the kids and me as crazy for David and the guys working on our church meeting space. We’ve barely seen him since we got home, and so the days have been long for all of us. This is the very hardest part, I believe. This building and scrambling and trying to get everything done right. And all with a project David has never done before — one that is very different from planting a church. But God is faithful. He is…
-
tapps.
We have some great news: yesterday David signed a three-year lease on a meeting space for our church! We are beyond thrilled and grateful for this provision from God. We’ve prayed and looked for months for a place to worship, wanted it to be in a visible spot right downtown. But never in our wildest dreams did we imagine it would be right on Main Street, just blocks from the state capital, and never thought it would be in the historic Tapp’s building, originally a department store and now an art center with residences overhead. Thanks so much for those of you who have been praying for this important step…
-
strawberries.
We had fun strawberry picking yesterday with friends from church. This was our first time and Judah and Amie took it very seriously. We filled two big buckets, and afterwards I washed, trimmed, and froze them on trays to pop in our green smoothies. Yum! Judah and Isabel looking carefully for the “dark red ones” Such a gorgeous spring day Baby Jesse and I love each other (sometimes I just want to munch on his arms) While the rest of us picked strawberries, Emma Taylor ate strawberries. I get to babysit this cutie because her parents do a babysitting coop with us; each couple gets two date nights a month. It’s…
-
the truth about support-raising.
When people learn about the kind of ministries we’ve been involved in one of the most-repeated remarks we hear is, “I just could never do a job where I have to raise support.” I understand that. Throughout our early years of marriage, as we looked and prayed and planned to go overseas, it was the thing I feared the most. All that money . . . And we had the added bonus of beginning our fund-raising journey in 2009, one of the worst years for our nation’s economy in recent history. The prospect was overwhelming. And now it’s 2013 and a big part of David’s job in this season involves…
-
church plant.
We meet formally as a group twice monthly to get to know one another, pray, and learn about the vision and values of the church. It’s also a great time for other people to come check us out and seeing if they may be interested in joining in. We had around 25 adults at our meeting Thursday night–a mix of singles, families, couples, college students, and there was childcare for the littles. We’re so very grateful to Columbia Crossroads Church who allows us to meet in their downtown campus free of charge. It’s the perfect space, right off Main Street. One of the biggest blessings in this process so far…
-
the pastor’s wife, part two.
In part one of this post, I shared the story of my journey to becoming a pastor’s wife. So God is giving me more and more of this freedom, this peace with the person He made me to be, this desire to be used by Him. What does that look like in our church plant? Who am I going to be and what am I going to do now that I’m a pastor’s wife? I’d say that my biggest passion for the church is relationships and community. To me, this is at the core of who the Church, who the Bride of Christ is. This is why we’re called the…
-
the pastor’s wife, part one.
So now it seems I’m a pastor’s wife. The reality is still just beginning to sink in and lately several friends have asked the question, “What do you think your gifts as a pastor’s wife are?” It’s a great question, and I plan to answer it here on the blog. But I want to start by telling you a story of my “growing into” the role of a pastor’s wife. I think it’s important to tell because it took a whole lot of work on God’s part—a lot of struggle and correction and love and learning—to bring me to where I am today. It’s a story that’s still being written. …
-
our next chapter: the story.
This was the whirlwind that was Summer, 2012: we came home from South Asia in June, and then officially said good-bye to our life there in September, when we’d heard the doctors’ report about my allergies. David flew back to pack up our apartment and ship our things, and all the while our heads were reeling from this finality, this ending of a story that seemed to have only just begun. (packing up our south asia home) In those bewildering weeks, as we grappled with the sudden ending of one life and tried to focus on getting me healthy, we asked every day, multiple times a day, “God . .…