Sunday, October 23, 2011

New Church Home

Hello!  Thought we'd give a little personal update on us, regarding our church home.  As many of you know, we were attending a church in Oakdale (RiverOak Grace) that we very much enjoyed being a part of.  We were a part of the Married's ministry and had a short stent at the info booth, during our 4 1/2 years of attending.

We loved every bit of it: the teaching, the people, the atmosphere...but since Emma came in to our lives it became a little more and more challenging to attend, as time went on.  We figured it was a stage and it'd get worked out.  Then one day I was thinking, "OK if it takes a couple of years to work it out, then we bring another baby in to our family...and on and on (because you know we're creating a baseball team here - JK!!), when will we get to be involved in our church community again?!".  I prayed about my feelings for about a month or so before sharing with Tyler how I was feeling.  When we sat to talk about it, it turned out we were both sharing the feelings of trying to build community in a community we didn't call home was extremely difficult.  And we only saw more and more obstacles as Emma (and other children) grow.

At that point, we began to pray together about it.  After about another month, we began to visit different churches in Turlock, since there are only about a hundred different ones :)  Eventually, we headed to New Life Christian Center where we immediately felt at ease and at home.  We can definitely see Emma growing in this community - there are so many kids there (of all ages).  We enjoy the teaching.  There are many ministries up and going - places we can just plug right in.  We've been placed in a Life Group that we completely fit in to and just love (even just 2 weeks in;0).  We can definitely see ourselves doing life with this neat group of people, and started to right away with opening up with right where we are in life now.

It's just slightly bigger than the church where we were (which we prefer smaller)...and after the Lord was taking me through different places of worship and seeing it from different angles, this past Sunday I had a worship experience I haven't had in about 10 years.  Amazing.  It just moved me and had me in tears.  Loved every minute of it.

Thought I'd share a link to this past week's sermon for anyone interested in checking it out, and hearing a great message!  click here to view.

If anyone that's local would like to attend with us - call me!

Thank you to everyone that joined us in prayer about finding where the Lord was leading us!

2 comments:

Aunt Nell said...

Thats awesome you found a new family church closer to your home!! Life sucks without a good church you feel at home at. :) Im so glad we have the two that we have here!! HAPPY SUNDAY!!

Cathy/Nani said...

So glad you found something that is good and grounded and WHERE you live. So great. :)counting the days.