On Our Way To Crazy

Remember that one time? When I decided to take 40 kids to camp? Including a bunch of new leaders and kids with nervous parents? And change everything about the youth program? And try to do 30 new things before I turn 30? And there was a ton of staff turnover and drama at work? And we had craziness and stress in pretty much every aspect of our lives?

No? Because IT JUST HAPPENED.

There is a lot going on. A lot. Mostly good stuff, honestly, but I am wiped the heck out. I don’t know whose idea it was for all of these things to go down in the same few weeks.

Oh, wait. Yes I do. It was mine.

I am really excited about everything. We are taking a ton of new kids to camp and it is always one of the best weeks of the year. The camp we go to is a service camp where the kids do missions projects in the city during the day, then we have regular camp stuff at night. They work really hard and come back with a whole different attitude about what their faith is about and how to put it into action in a real way. And it is FUN. Insanely fun. I can’t wait.

It’s what’s happening when we get back that is stressing me out. I have been working and planning and meeting and talking and talking and talking about this for months. For the past few years we have had youth group at the same time as ‘big church’. We did it in the school, partly out of necessity and partly because we were working to get a program off the ground and we needed to be where the kids were. And it went really well. We’ve continued to do it since we’ve been in the building, though, for two reasons – because we’ve always done it, and because it’s convenient for the families. Pretty much the worst reasons to base your ministry around.

So we’re shaking it up. Starting the week after camp, the kids will be in service together. They will be part of the church first, and the youth group second. They will sit together, participate in communion and baptism and worship, listen to the same teaching the rest of the church is getting. They will be greeters and children’s workers and coffee servers. We are moving our youth program to Monday nights. I am excited about this for so many reasons… we are going to have more time (two-plus hours instead of not quite one), more space (we are meeting in the main building instead of the converted conference room), more volunteers (not meeting during church gives us access to more adults), and just more awesomeness. I cannot wait. I fully believe in the shift we’re making, and I know it’s the right thing for our group and for our church. I’ve been meeting with parents for weeks, selling the vision and getting input and making sure we’re on the right path. They get it. The senior staff gets it. The volunteers get it. We are rolling.

The kids? Not so much. They don’t want to go to big church. They like getting to spend Sunday mornings playing games and talking and having everything be about them. Which I get. They think service is boring and full of old people and not cool. Which I also get. It’s also why we are doing this… to keep them from graduating with no experience in a greater faith community and bailing on church (and potentially faith) when it stops being all about them. Which I really get. But they don’t.

But they will. We will figure it out. For all the frustration we’ve dealt with over the past few years with having and losing the cafeteria, having and losing the youth house, bouncing around and changing meeting times and places and generally living in chaos, one unexpected thing has come from it – they seem trust me. Their parents definitely do. Even when there is insanity and confusion, we come out on the other side okay. So even if this sounds scary and uncool and not fun, when I tell them it is for the best they (mostly) hear that.

So! Lots going on. It is completely overwhelming. But exciting, right? Yes. Exciting.

I’ve never been big into worship music and singing at church. It has always made me feel really self-conscious. I’m not very expressive, I don’t really raise my hands, I always feel like everyone is looking at me. It’s not something I’ve ever really been able to shake.

On Sunday mornings I am usually dealing with kids or talking to parents or trying to calm down before I have to do the announcements. I sing when it’s singing time, but it doesn’t really feel like personal time, if that makes sense. It feels like work time. And that’s okay.

Last night I went to a local college/young adult service called Kairos. Our music pastor at church is one of the worship leaders there, and she invited the staff to come because they were doing a night of music. I went because I am a nice person and a couple of my college kids were going. It’s one of those big, flashy events with cool lights and several screens and projections on the walls that look like stained glass. The music is really loud. Everyone on stage looks like a country music star. Everyone in the crowd is under 23. It is so not my scene.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself crying by the third song.

It had been a long, long time since I’d been a part of a service of any kind that I didn’t have any responsibility in. It was dark and loud and crowded, and I got to just stand there, completely anonymously, and participate. There was no way anyone could hear me singing. The chances were slim that anyone could even see me. I could listen, and sing, and really pay attention to the words. I could focus. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to focus during a service? No? Well. A while.

I did not expect last night to have any kind of effect on me. (I don’t know what it says about me that I went into it so cynically.) I definitely did not expect to find solitude and freedom surrounded by 1400 flashy strangers. But I did. And I needed it desperately. And I am very, very thankful.

Oh no, You never let go
Through the calm and through the storm
Oh no, You never let go
In every high and every low
Oh no, You never let go
Lord, You never let go of me

When I started my job, I had no real idea what I was walking into. I knew I loved students, and I knew I loved my church, and I knew that my job with Reba was not the long-term solution for me. So I jumped in.

Do you now, in the presence of this church, commit yourself to this sacred trust and its attendant responsibilities?

I didn’t know what it looked like to work in ministry. I didn’t know how to have a pastor who was also your boss. I didn’t know how difficult it would be to balance work and personal time when so much of it was one and the same.

Will you, who are called to lead, still humbly follow pastoral direction?

I didn’t know how to teach. I didn’t know how to write Bible study lessons. I didn’t know what was important for students to learn about God and faith. I didn’t know what they would be interested in and what would make them think and what would change their lives.

Will you be diligent in your study of the Holy Scriptures, workmen who need not be ashamed, rightly dividing and applying its precepts?

But I did know how much they needed to be loved. And I did know what a difference it makes for a teenager to have an adult who cares about their well being. I knew that the only way they would care about God and faith and the Bible after high school was if someone gave them room to ask questions and learn and doubt in a safe place. I knew I could provide them that.

Will you undertake to be a faithful, loving and courageous pastor to all who need your care?

I learned quickly. Trial by fire. I learned that this was no ordinary job. I learned that who I was at home mattered in my work. I learned that a job you love can come at a cost. I weighed that cost daily. I struggled and struggled and struggled. I tried to be a good person and care for the people in my new world, even when it hurt and burned and they didn’t care for me in return.

Will you pattern your life and ministry after the life and ministry of your Lord and will you first teach by example what you will teach by words that the cause of God be not mocked?

I learned the value of words and the weight of actions and that how you speak matters more sometimes even than what you’re saying. I am still learning how to keep my defenses in check. How to turn the other cheek. How to hold my tongue when necessary.

Will you be a person of prayer and private devotion: a contemplative shepherd who spends time alone with God?

I know now that I can’t do this on my own. That no combination of organization and planning and personality can make this job happen. You can’t give what you don’t have, and trying will knock you out faster than LL Cool J. I am learning to take time for myself when I need it, whether that’s a quick road trip or a weekend in Texas or an afternoon at the park. It’s part of my job. It has to happen or I am ineffective before I even get started.
……………………

This past Sunday, I stood in front of my family, my students, my friends and my church body and said “I Will” and “I Do” to the requirements of an ordained pastor. The spiritual giants in my life stood over me, laid hands on me, robed me and presented me to the congregation. I helped lead communion for the first time. I went from pastor to Pastor.

May the Lord who has given you the will to promise these things forever give you the grace and power to perform them.

Amen, and amen.

I read a lot when I was a kid. Babysitter’s Club, Sleepover Friends, Sweet Valley High, the Wayside School books. But somehow I missed the Anne of Green Gables series. I don’t know how, but I did. And I am kind of mad at everyone I knew in the 80′s for not giving it to me.

I’ve had a copy on my shelf for a while that I picked up at the library sale, an I finally read it a couple of weeks ago. Then I immediately ordered a box set of the first three books on Amazon. I finished those in about five seconds and ordered the rest of them. They are so wonderful. I wish so much that I had known Anne as a child.

I got to spend a few days last week at a youth pastor workshop in Georgia. It was totally free and totally last minute, and it was awesome. Three days at a beautiful retreat center with my own huge room, fancy bathroom, and hours in the evenings with no technology but lots of books. I sat with 40 other people (all guys, of course) who do the same thing I do every day and we talked programming, lesson writing, parent struggles and long-term planning. We ate delicious food and did not judge each other for taking seconds on the apple pie. It was a great, much much needed break and I am so thankful I got to go.

A couple of weeks ago I found myself on a ‘thank you’ kick. I sent notes to people who have gone out of their way for me or the kids recently, I emailed authors of books that touched me, I wrote to a guy who has been really helpful to Aaron lately. Responses have started to trickle in, and it totally makes my day every time. It’s amazing what paying a little attention will do for you.

I don’t want to go to Bonnaroo. I don’t. I know I would be miserable. But it’s hard to see that when I’m looking at a lineup that includes: The Avett Brothers, The Dead Weather, Conan (!), Weezer, Phoenix, LCD Soundsystem, Aziz Ansari, Brandi Carlile, The Punch Brothers, Miranda Lambert, OK Go and Kings of Leon. Seriously, y’all. SERIOUSLY.

Yesterday we took our kids to work on a neighborhood revitalization project near where a lot of them live. It was a really run down part of town that most of them didn’t even know existed. They got to meet the people who live there and do some construction work on a house for a family who is crammed into a one-bedroom apartment right now. They painted, scrubbed, sawed, crawled under the basement, sheetrocked and caulked. I was so impressed by them, as usual.

The other day I was talking to a group of people and I mentioned that, when I eat M&Ms or Skittles, I pour the whole bag out and separate them into colors. THEY FREAKED OUT. Is that really so weird? The separating part? I hadn’t even gotten to the part where I count them and make sure I have the same amount of each color, then eat the extras, then arrange them into some kind of aesthetically-pleasing pattern. I decided to spare them those details for fear they would never speak to me again.

I totally forgot to blog about this! Last month we got to go see Jennifer Knapp open for Todd Snider. JENNIFER KNAPP. TODD SNIDER. Are you familiar with Todd Snider? I had forgotten how awesome he is. It was a great show… he played for a couple of hours and I could have easily listened for a couple more. It was awesome.

For a couple of people have never taken Valentine’s Day particularly seriously, we had a whole mess of stuff going on this weekend. I am wiped out.

It all started Friday night with a youth girls’ sleepover at our house. Thirteen girls and two adults crammed into our tiny house, with all the pillows and blankets and games and movies and marshmallows and kool-aid and glitter that come with them. It was out of control.

We played a rousing game of Celebrity (which included references to both the Andrews Sisters and BILL CROSBY, which I took to mean Bill Cosby but actually meant Bing Crosby, apparently my junior high girls were born in in the 1920s) before tackling a Valentine’s cookie making project. I thought it was going to be simple – roll out the dough, cut out the hearts, bake and decorate. No problem. Somehow, instead, we ended up with a mountain of oily batter that would not shape into hearts no matter what we did to it and flour everywhere. EVERYWHERE. It was all over the kitchen, in their hair, on our clothes. Messy messy messy. Fun fun fun.

After not nearly enough hours of sleep, we got them up and headed over to a nearby assisted living center for our monthly service project. The kids sang old hymns and visited with the residents, and were overall just full of awesome. I was really proud of them – for a lot of them it was their first time to do something like that, and making conversation with people in those situations can be pretty nerve-wracking. But they did a great job.

We got home mid-afternoon, just in time to turn around and go to a Valentine’s event our church’s men’s ministry put together. It was exactly what you think it was – dressed up old people, roses, cheesy love songs, linens, tiny desserts. But it was oh so much more. There was a barbershop quartet. There was a picture of our pastor dressed as Elvis. There was contraband wine snuck in from the hotel restaurant. There was an under-the-breath Delilah reference that made me cry from trying not to laugh.

It was… not cool. But we had fun with the other four people there under the age of fifty, and we learned a valuable lesson – sit in the back corner where no one can see you. And bring a flask.

We celebrated the actual day by doing nothing, thank goodness. We had a good morning in youth group, a quick lunch, and then spent the entire rest of the day reading, napping and watching the Olympics. We ate sweet tart hearts and pineapple salsa and it was glorious.

I have never been much of a Bruce Springsteen fan. He wasn’t a big player in the music of my childhood, and I don’t really connect to his working man Jersey persona. I don’t think those things are the problem, though.

I didn’t watch a lot about Sesame Street from when I was a kid. I think I was more of a Mr. Rogers kind of girl. But I do have a very clear memory of the Muppets singing a version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”. They had changed the title to “Born to Add”, and the verses were about adding one trashcan to two to get three trashcans, then one policeman to three to get four policemen. Groundbreaking stuff.

My parents weren’t big Springsteen fans, so I don’t think I knew the song outside of it’s math-centric version. And now, anytime I hear Bruce Springsteen’s voice, I see a Muppet and hear the addition lyrics. Which is pretty awesome. But it makes it really difficult for me to take him seriously.

Remedy Drive has a song on an Olympics commercial! Aaron knew it was a possibility, but we didn’t know for sure that it was happening until last night when it aired during Saturday Night Live and his phone started blowing up.

So if you see a Budweiser-sponsored ad for the Olympics, probably airing during late night TV, pay special attention. The very first shot is four beers clinking, and the lyrics are “Hope’s not giving up.” SO AWESOME.

We live two blocks from an elementary school. It has a great playground and park area behind it that we have sadly underutilized. But yesterday, on the first nice-ish day we’ve had in ten thousand years, Aaron and I decided it was time to play basketball. OH MY GOSH. It was so much fun. We played all the games and drills we could remember from our high school days – Knockout, Horse, layup and free throw and three-pointer drills. It completely wiped me out but was awesomely fun. We will definitely be back.

Are you guys on the Avett Brothers bandwagon? I have known for a while that it was my kind of thing, but for whatever reason just never took the plunge. Then we had a week full of grey rainy days and I needed new music that was also moody and mellow-ish. Something with feeling. ENTER AVETT BROTHERS. I am now completely obsessed with them. They are just a perfect little band. I love their voices, love their lyrics, love their sound.

They were on Austin City Limits last night. After it was over I rewound it and immediately watched the show again. They are fantastic.

Let’s talk about Parks and Recreation. It is easily my favorite Thursday night show. It has been exponentially more funny than The Office and 30 Rock this season.

We love us some Tom Haverford in this house, so when we saw that Aziz Ansari was doing a comedy special, we immediately set the DVR. That is one funny kid. This clip is from Jimmy Kimmel, but it’s pretty much exactly the way he told the story on the show. It makes me hurt from laughing. Also, slightly dirty. Just FYI.

I know I say this all the time, but I really really really love my job. Church politics and staff stress and personal issues aside, it is outside the scope of my comprehension that I get to do what I do every day. This weekend I got to hang out with college girls who I’ve known since they were in junior high, and with junior highers who say awesome things like “Make peace, don’t, like, not make peace” and who bring their Harry Potter sorting hat pillowcases to class so we can split up into the appropriate teams. Amazing.

Greek starts back up tomorrow! I love my teeny-bopper TV shows.

In my post earlier this week about Jesus Girls, I mentioned briefly that we had to define a spiritual metaphor for our lives in my ordination class. I meant to wind my way back to mine in the context of that post, I really did, but it was getting super wordy and I just couldn’t get there. But I wanted to write it out here, both for you guys and for myself. It always helps to write this stuff down.

The metaphor I used in class was a song. While I have no discernible musical talent of any kind, music has always been a big part of my life. I really like the idea of our faith being a song. It works on several levels: the individual as the songs, unique unto ourselves but also part of a genre or style of music as well as music as a whole; parts of a song like parts of a body, each playing it’s individual role but adding up to something bigger and more beautiful than it can be on it’s own; there is a basic theory and structure to music but within that functionality the form can be whatever you want it to be. Clearly I am feeling the idea that faith is personal and that there’s not one way to do it and if you don’t get it right you are out.

But the concept I like the best is the idea of Jesus being a song to be in tune with. I got the idea from Rob Bell’s Nooma video called “Rhythm”. (You can watch it here.) Here are some key quotes:

“An infinite, massive, kind of invisible God, that’s hard to get our minds around. But truth, mercy, love, grace, justice, compassion – the way Jesus lived… I can see that. I can understand that. I can relate to that. I can play that song.”

“Jesus is like God in taking on flesh and blood, and so in his generosity. In his compassion, that’s what God’s like. In his telling of the truth, that’s what God’s like. In his love, and forgiveness, and sacrifice, that’s what God’s like. That’s who God is. That’s how the song goes.”

I love the idea that when we are truly following Jesus, when our lives most closely resemble his, that we are in tune with the song. It just makes sense to me. It’s the kind of faith I can get behind, the kind I am comfortable teaching my kids to have.

Sorry to be so quote happy today, but I wanted to close this post out with a quote from Sin Boldly, one of my favorite books from last year:

“I have a favorite t-shirt that reads, “Jesus is my mixtape.” When I bought it, I thought its slogan was charmingly quirky, but over time it has acquired this transcendent quality, a motto that sums up my belief that everything – everything – is spiritual. At the center of that everythingness, as a pastor friend of mine likes to describe it, is a universal rhythm, a song we all play, like a giant, motley orchestra. Sometimes in tune, sometimes off-key. We call it by different names. Still, it remains – if only we have ears to hear it – the eternal soundtrack that plays in the background of our lives.”

I like it.

After we finished our read-through of the Bible in my ordination class last month, we decided to take it easy for a while. Take a break from the insane pace and piles of studying we’d been doing for over two years and just spend some time talking. So, for the past several weeks, we’ve been taking turns telling our stories. Who we are, where we come from, how we got here. What we think. What we believe. It’s been such an interesting and enlightening exercise getting to know each other in such an intimate way.

I worked for days putting mine together. I wanted to hit all the important details, but also have a thread that tied the whole thing together. Part of what we were required to do was define a metaphor for our spiritual views… a picture of how we see the world and how our faith fits into that idea.

If I had been asked that question ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, it would have been easy. Something about spiritual discipline, exercise, how working hard will get you where you need to be, spiritually-speaking. But I’m not really that person anymore. My life, and my outlook, has a lot more grey than black and white.

I took my turn before I read this book, sadly. It would have made the process a lot easier. Or, if nothing else, reminded me that I’m not alone on this road.

Jesus Girls is a collection of essays about “growing up female and evangelical”. It’s a book of women, like me, who came of age in the church and have had something of a complicated relationship with it ever since. Some have reconciled, some have not, but they all have a story to tell. And not a black and white, right and wrong story. A real story.

Like this, from Anne Dayton, that I’m pretty sure she wrote while looking INTO MY BRAIN. She writes how it felt to get involved in church as a teenager with a family that didn’t find it as… appealing as she did. (It is taking all the self control I have not to type out the entire essay, just FYI.)

I was hooked. With the fervency of a new believer, I threw myself into youth group. I started coming every Wednesday night and promptly developed a crush on one of the boys. I soon felt very comfortable there, but no matter how many weekend retreats and campouts I went on, I knew almost instinctually that I could never quite fit in. I hadn’t been in Sunday school with them since nursery. They all seemed to have this vast and secret knowledge of song lyrics that I could never hope to acquire. They listened to the right music – Michael W. Smith and Stephen Curtis Chapman and Amy Grant, and later Audio Adrenaline and the Newsboys – not Mariah Carey and Nirvana and Weezer. In short, they had a carefully filtered world filled with positive influences and inspirational media that would lead them along the way everlasting. I had a family who watched PBS on Sunday mornings.

My family listened to America’s Country Countdown on Sunday mornings, but the rest of it sounds very familiar. It didn’t have anything to do with my family, or, really, with the youth group specifically. I just had such a desire to belong. There is nothing worse than being fifteen and feeling like an outsider.

I wanted someone to give me a True Love Waits ring. I craved one of those “Go Against the Flow” t-shirts.

But I never got any of those things. Mostly, I think, because I never bothered to ask. And to this day, I’m not really sure why. My parents are not selfish ogres, nor are they anti-church. They never denied me much.

I guess it somehow didn’t occur to me to ask my parents to buy these things for me. Part of my reticence was a shyness, a sense that religion was a private affair, and that talking about it was deeply revealing and embarrassing. Even in church, I couldn’t work up the courage to pray out loud; prayer was something I did in the quiet space of my mind. We rarely talked about God in my house. The one time my mom suggested I pray over a Thanksgiving dinner, I was so self-conscious I just shook my head and started eating.

I’m sure there was also a certain sense of guilt involved, as if embracing the Christian subculture was rejecting the mainstream world my family lived in, and thus, them.

In Kari’s review of the same book, she talks about the idea of testimony and how we were taught early on that ours needed to be compelling so as to win more people over to Christ. That was never an idea I was comfortable with, partially because I didn’t really feel like it was my job to convince people to believe, and partially because my story wasn’t all that interesting. I wasn’t a drug addict or a gang member or a prostitute before Jesus found a place in my life. He didn’t turn my life around, he came alongside me on the path I was already taking.

Instead, my story is about finding room at the table for everyone. I had the idea that Christians were all the same shape, and you better squeeze and contort yourself until you fit the mold. Now I understand that we are all who we are because that’s who we’re supposed to be, because we are made in the image of God and there’s a lot more to who he is than we can imagine. I understand that faith is personal, and unique, and that it has very little to do with listening to the right music or wearing the right clothes or having the right job.

But even though I was stuck with parents who drank wine with dinner and believed in science, they allowed me space to be who I wanted, and they tried to encourage a healthy balance between my “church things” an the rest of my world. In other words, they were always trying to get me to lighten up.

College is a time when you’re supposed to refocus your view of the world. My Christian friends were questioning the narrowness of the culture they had been brought up in, and many started rebelling against the parents who had sheltered them in the bubble of Christian pop culture. I, on the other hand, was looking at the choices I had made and wondering if maybe my parents might have been right all along.

And the reason I can understand those things is not because of the church, at least not the church as I knew it in high school and college. It’s because of the family I was born into, the one that taught me to love the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac and Sunday morning breakfast, and also how to think for myself and be independent and not let someone else dictate who I am.

They were teaching me the lessons that would later define both the faith I cling to and the way I teach the teenagers in the youth group I am now in charge of. I just didn’t see it at the time.

Happy New Year’s Eve, friends! What are you doing tonight? Got big plans? We bailed on all party plans and are instead grilling fajitas and drinking both the champagne of beers and actual champagne. Should be a good time. I made guacamole.

Was 2009 good to you? Does anyone else feel like it was about three seconds long? We had a pretty good one. A lot happened. Lots of stress. Lots of fun. Lots of taco salads from Baja Burrito.

I was trying to decide what kind of post to write on the last day of the year – introspective? Celebratory? Thought-provoking? (Ha!) I had a whole mess of stuff I wanted to mention, so I decided to go with the old standby. The list.

Things I Loved In 2009

• Twitter. Are you twittering? You should be twittering. It is the best, even though I’m pretty sure it’s to blame for my weak posting action this year. All the little thoughts I would usually try to stretch into an actual cohesive post are instead dumped into twitter where all my random friends can see them. Do they care? I don’t know. But I enjoy reading their little thoughts a lot. Also, Amazon mp3.
• Service projects with the kids. After a rough start, 2009 kicked into high gear for GPYG at MFuge. They spent the week working hard and serving people, and came back with a strong sense of purpose that it didn’t have to end there. Based on that, we started a program called Second Saturday, where we take the second Saturday of each month and use it to serve the community. This fall we packed thousands of food boxes, served food and washed mountains of dishes in a soup kitchen, helped 300 needy families find gifts for their kids and wrapped gifts for the angel tree. I am so proud that the spirit of service has become one of the defining characteristics of our group, and I can’t wait to see where they take it in 2010.
• Switchfoot’s Hello Hurricane. I mentioned this one yesterday in our best songs of 2009 list, but I want to make sure I am getting my feelings across here. THIS RECORD IS AMAZING. Easily the best Switchfoot record. It has a great mix of rock songs (like real actual rock songs, not the Christian music lite-rock version) and mellow ones, and lyrically they completely knock it out of the park. I could, and have, listen to it over and over and over again. I love it so much.
• Sin Boldly by Cathleen Falsani. I read this way back in January, and it stuck with me all year. I don’t do a lot of rereading (says the girl who read all of the Harry Potter books this year, AGAIN), but I think this one might be an annual read for me.
• Glee. The most fun TV show there is. I love Puck, I love Sue, I love Mr. Shue. But most of all, I love the way they portray the kids. It’s fantastical, sure, and you have to suspend pretty much all of your disbelief. But the kids nail it. You really care about them. And the singing is awesome. Plus, it’s influence brought us the Sing-off, and that brought me the Beelzebubs. And they are awesome. (Watch this. And this. And this.)
• My Blackberry. Don’t judge me, y’all. This stupid little thing changed my life. I had a smartphone before, but it totally sucked. The Blackberry doesn’t freeze up on me, the battery lasts forever, my church email pushes through onto it and it has GPS. I know you think your iphone is cooler, and you’re probably right. But my Blackberry keeps me from getting lost, keeps me from being chained to my computer and NEVER DIES.
• The Youth Room. 2008 ended up being kind of a tough one for my GPYG-ers. We lost our meeting space last August and worked really hard to hold ourselves together until we built our building, only to end up with no youth space then, either. At the end of the summer I talked the board into letting us take over part of the church office building so the kids could have ownership over something. It’s not ideal, but it’s ours. We took a boring brown conference room and youthed it up good, and now we have a space that is ours for the first time ever. It’s too small, it doesn’t have heat and if the weather is bad we are crammed in there tight, but our name is on the door. And that is good.
• Shows – Andrew Peterson, Waterdeep, Jennifer Knapp, Counting Crows, Ben Folds, Over the Rhine, Wicked, a ton of youth productions, a thousand Remedy Drive shows, Chris Thile, Andy and the Andys, and a million more I can’t even remember. It was a good year to buy a ticket and see a show.
• My girlfriends. This is kind of a new one for me. I’ve always had friends, and my job comes with kind of a built-in social circle. But I’ve never been that great at letting people in. This year was different, though. I had a lot going on, and I needed to talk about it. So I did. I let my walls down and really talked to my friends. And they talked to me. And we assured each other that the things we were saying weren’t crazy, and that we weren’t horrible people even though we really felt like we were, and that we could get through it and it was okay if we had to have the same conversation a million times. I would have gone crazy this year without them.

This year was a mixed bag for me, but overall, I think it was a success. The good outweighed the bad, and I am thankful.

(Sorry for the lack of capital letters in this list. I typed them in correctly, but they came out lowercase and I don’t know how to fix it. I promise I have better typing etiquette than that.)

Does anyone feel like it was September about three seconds ago? How is it time for Christmas already?

This month has been a tough one. Aaron has had job stress like never before. We’ve had a million youth events. Two of the pastors on staff at the church left for what are very personal and totally up-and-up reasons, and while it is totally the right thing for their family (and therefore the church) it is going to be a serious challenge to move forward without them. We had a heck of a time trying to figure out Christmas with our families. December has been long and tiring.

Every year, when September rolls around, I get excited. It’s the start of my favorite part of the year – fall, school, Halloween, pumpkins, holidays, coats, boots, Christmas. It’s the best. But it just FLIES by, y’all. I blinked twice and it’s time to fly to Texas for Christmas. CHRISTMAS. How did we get here?

The season has been full of fun things, too. I took the kids to see Remedy Drive and Family Force Five (alone!) and it was one of the best nights we’ve had in a long time. We had our annual Christmas service project and party, where the kids helped over 300 people pick out gifts for their families and then made videos of themselves singing songs to strangers and doing high kicks in front of Starbucks. We had a full fancy holiday meal with our care group and I came home with a sweet plastic sword that makes swordfighting noises when you swish it. (That’s what you do with a sword, right? Swish it?) We went to the Andrew Peterson Christmas show for the sixth straight year and got to spread out on the pew after our friends bailed at the last minute. We went through several chocolate pies.

It’s all been good. But all the good plus all the hard equals a blur of a month and an exhausted couple of people. I am looking forward to going to Texas. I am. I just can’t believe it’s time to do this already.