In college, I had an on-again, off-again relationship with a local church. I attended nearly every week of my freshman year, and at the end of the year, I felt like I knew no one.

The youth pastor was really nice and invited me to get involved in the youth ministry, but one night of bowling with teenagers was enough to prove to me that I was no longer cut out to handle groups of people under the age of 18 on a regular basis. So I looked for other ways to get involved in the church (turned out, there were none for young adults like me who didn’t want to do children’s or youth ministry), and I showed up every Sunday morning and listened to the sermon.

I still miss the sermons at that church. The pastor had a doctorate and preached amazing sermons that were both spiritually compelling and intellectually stimulating. He engaged your emotions, made you laugh, and made you fall in love with the Bible, especially the Old Testament. He could make the most random passages from the OT unbelievably relevant to 21st century life.

But with no way for me to really get involved in the church, I never felt at home. I stopped going during my sophomore and junior years because I so desperately wanted a “home church” again. I looked at many other churches, but none of them really fit.

Finally, senior year, I ended up back at the same church. I determined that I would stick it out and force the church to become my home, like it or not.

I remember one Sunday morning, I had been having a terrible week. My emotions were haywire and all I wanted to do was hide from the world. I was depressed, and I didn’t really want to go to church, but I wanted to get out of the house, and maybe, just maybe church would make me feel better.

I was so discouraged that morning, I didn’t even have the heart to take a shower and wear nice clothes. I went in ratty workout pants and a sweatshirt. Now, this church wasn’t exactly an old-fashioned, dress-up kind of church. But I personally like dressing up a little bit on Sunday mornings. I don’t think I had ever before in my life gone to church on a Sunday morning in workout pants and a hoodie. But my entire body was reflecting my emotional state that morning, and I just didn’t have the heart to care.

I showed up at church, slumped by myself in a middle aisle, and made it through the entire service without anyone noticing me or talking to me. I remember thinking that if this church really had a strong community life, if I really belonged there, that surely someone would notice how strange it was for me to show up to church practically wearing pajamas and huddling by myself. Someone would have shown concern and asked what was wrong. But people barely remembered my name, let alone my normal demeanor and clothing choices.

Fast forward many years…Matt and I ended up at Calvary Church in Naperville after we got engaged. We wanted to find a church neither one of us had attended before, so it didn’t feel like one of us had to give up our church for the other. I was pretty nervous about going to Calvary. It was much bigger than any church I had ever attended. I thought there was no way you could get to really know people in a place like that. After all, I had enough trouble in a church of a couple hundred in Wheaton. How could I make real friends in a church of thousands?

Last week, various stressors of moving were really getting to me. I showed up to Calvary late on Sunday morning, fake smile pasted on my face, wearing the right colors for Sunday morning worship in the choir. I snuck my way behind the alto section and tried to get into my usual spot in the back row of the sopranos without anyone noticing. One of my friends in the tenor section turned around and said, “Angel, what’s wrong?”

I hesitated. How could he tell something was wrong? I hadn’t come in my pajamas. I was even smiling.

“It’s been a stressful week,” I acknowledged.

“I can see it in your face,” he said.

After just a few short years at Calvary, coming there is like coming home. One look at my face, and friends notice what’s going on. There’s no hiding. But there is sharing, praying, caring. Love.

I will miss you so much, Calvary friends (family). I already can’t wait to come home and visit you next summer. Thank you for being the hands and feet of Jesus in our lives, for noticing, listening, sharing, and praying. We love you!

You’re probably all dying to hear about Matt’s other passions (I’ll give you a hint about one of his major passions–it was the very last thing he wrote about in the previous post) or at the least some controversial theology…

But, unfortunately, once again, life finds us ridiculously busy.

I work 34 hours a week at Matt’s company, Simple Truths and baby-sit for 8 hours on Friday nights, so my schedule is getting pretty packed.  We have enjoyed a few more get-togethers with some of our neighbors and hope to have more in the future.  We’ve been keeping up with some friends, but there are many more who remain on our list of friends we need to hang out with soon, but haven’t been able to yet.  (Parties are a great way to reconnect with many people at once.  Keep having them, everyone!)

Our weekends have been pretty busy lately with family coming in from Indiana to visit us.  This weekend we are going to the gospel choir concert at Wheaton.  For Thanksgiving, we are going to Michigan and then Toronto to visit Matt’s family.  Then after that, Christmas craziness starts.  Every weekend is already full of parties, get-togethers, concerts, etc.  Lots of stuff going on, but it will all be fun.  Just no time for blogging

But we WILL try to make time for some meaningful posts.  I was just encouraged this morning by our Axiom meeting to begin working on my book for real.  I have a little dream to write a book designed for engaged Christians a.k.a. sex newbs.  I looked everywhere for a book designed for that purpose before we got married and found nothing fully devoted to that subject.  I like writing and opining, so I figured I would make an attempt to put something out there.  If nothing else, you may be seeing a lot of posts related to the book as I work on it over the next several months.

Well, time to hit the sack.  We played volleyball tonight at church.  It was saweet, but we’re both pretty pooped now.  Till next time!

Looks like our goal of posting every week hasn’t been met. How does life get away from you like that? We do intend to keep up with our “deep” posts, but for the sake of writing SOMETHING, ANYTHING to keep our readers coming back for more, here are some not so deep updates.

I (Angel) started working part-time for the customer service department at Matt’s company. It’s been great getting to know the people I work with and having something intelligent to fill my time with after these past two years of work that mainly consisted of trying to convince kids to eat and changing diapers. I also have a newfound appreciation for the people on the other end of those automated “contact us” portions of websites. Though I have to say, our company does a much better job of responding to our inquiries than most of the companies I’ve had to contact. Unashamed plug.

Things have been busy at work for Matt, and he’s also been focusing a lot on wushu (Chinese kung fu) for a competition he competed in last weekend and so he can test for his next rank soon. He got three sweet plaques from doing so well in the competition. And he looked pretty hot too (in my non-martial-arts-oriented opinion).

We have been trying to get our budgeting on track post-wedding and figure out joint finances. Not the most fun way to spend evenings, but a necessity. Especially since I realized that when I hadn’t checked my old checking account in awhile, I had been racking up daily fees for having overdrawn my checkbook from a check I had written but forgot to record in my bank book. Yikes. We’re going to talk to the bank about that and see if there’s any way to get those fees, even some of them, revoked since I had a bunch of money in my savings account that they could have transferred over for me. They did end up transferring the money about a week ago, finally, but not until the account had incurred $200 in fines. Yeah, it would have been nice for them to think of doing that after the first couple of days instead of waiting a month. Or at least to have contacted me to let me know what was happening.

We’ve also been trying to maintain our social lives in the midst of the busyness. We hung out with some friends from Matt’s wushu club this weekend. We watched “The Nightmare Before Christmas” to get ourselves in the fall spirit on Friday night with Matt’s former roommates and co. We had our neighbors over for dinner last week and enjoyed getting to know them and meet some of them for the first time. I love having a husband to meet and greet neighbors with; it’s the best Much less awkward than when you’re a small, vulnerable single female trying to build relationships with strangers who live near you. I read “The Suburban Christian” last year and wished that I could do more connected things with my neighbors, but it just didn’t feel right trying to do that with our single male neighbors. Confusing signals tend to happen a lot in our culture with male/female interactions, and I have to say it’s nice being married and not having to deal with quite as many of them.

Okay, that was about as deep as this post is getting. One final update: we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re going to try and do next year. A few options are on the table, so please pray for us to have wisdom as we seek God’s will for our next step and when to take it.