Month of Gratitude: Day 13

I'm thankful for a church to call home. We've been going to theMovement for over 6 years now. If you're looking for a church in North County, we'll take you with us to check it out.

A little history (hang in there, this will hopefully come full circle)... When we first got married, I was so unsure about a few things in our life. I graduated from UCLA early, moved back to San Diego, got married, and started a new job within about two months, and there was a major knee surgery for Seth in that mix too. The hard part was I loved UCLA (more on that later) and I loved my friends there, all of whom were still there in their senior year. I loved my husband and being married, but I wondered if we should have joined Campus Crusade staff or spent a year abroad, which many of our friends were doing. I longed for more, or maybe just different. I had spent so much of college really involved in ministry and the lives of others, the pace of an 8-5 job and "normal" life was quite an adjustment.

In the midst of this wondering and longing, we searched for a church. We visited a few, honestly probably looking for what we had left. We walked into theMovement one Sunday and stayed. We started inviting others. We felt particularly called to invite Seth's cousin (hi Heather!) and her then boyfriend. They started coming and inviting more people, and then her sister came and then another cousin and another sister and eventually it was pretty much a family reunion every Sunday. It's changed a little since then (we now typically go to 8am service where we see about 7 other people who also rose with the sun) and the church has grown a lot since then, in numbers and spiritually. This really had very little to do with us, I'm sure God would have brought all of those people back to church without Seth and I even being in the same city, but we were blessed to be a part of it. If we had been at UCLA or on staff with Crusade in another city or doing ministry in South America, we wouldn't have been here, we wouldn't have started going to theMovement and we wouldn't have invited anyone along with us. It's a reminder to us that 1. sometimes things that seem less than amazing and boringly normal have a lot more going on behind the scenes, even if it's not entirely what you wanted or envisioned and 2.  family is a very important ministry.