Community

Yesterday we celebrated God's faithfulness in my big girl's life.  He has sustained her for 12 years and I know He is growing her and drawing her to Himself.  It's been a privilege and challenge raising this very strong will girl but Caleb and I wouldn't have been able to do it well without our friends and family coming alongside us, our community.  We miss our community back in California, but God opened my eyes to something last night...He has brought us to a new community.

She stood in the middle of the group of kids while we all sang happy birthday to her.  While I was watching her get all shy with all eyes on her, I noticed that this group of people that the Lord blessed us with was helping us celebrate her life and God's faithfulness in her life and they wanted to do it as well.  It may be a different community but because of Jesus it's the same community.

With much prayer we can confidently say we found our church family.  It's still all new because I'm still getting to know everyone personally, but little by little God is allowing me to open up and allow people to see me.  Community is important and we both knew that trying to live this Christian life apart from a community of believers would be very dangerous...so we sought out and intentionally visited different churches, praying for the Lord to guide us to the one that He wants us to serve His children at. 

What a blessing that it didn't take long to find this church family.  From the first summer BBQ that we went to (Caleb didn't even warn us that we were going to meet new people...anxiety level through the roof) to singing a birthday song during missional community, God had orchestrated everything.  I'm very humbled, here I am complaining and missing CFBC while the Lord is providing us a great group of people here.  I'm still trying to figure out the culture here, the dynamics of this community but I'm not hesitant to get involved and serve people while figuring it out.  I want to know what "family" means here, what it means to live out Jesus here, and to serve His people here.  I think I got so use to the how things were back home that I wanted everything to be the same...but the beauty of God's people is that it's not the same but it's also the same. 

It's been a huge blessing to live life with Legacy Church of Bellingham.  They have been a huge evidence of grace to our lives because they have all been so welcoming and understanding how difficult being away from everyone we know has been.  But it's also been refreshing because although we haven't been going to this church family for that long...I see the love that they have for each other and the care they have for us, basically strangers in their midst.  And that is the wonderful beautiful display of the gospel.