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Beth, Larissa, Julius and Bonnie did a great job prepping for everyone to feel welcomed when they walk through the front door
Josh and Ellen did a great job making last minute AV decisions
Matt opens things up while the communion table Erin created shines up front
Margarita and Co. created a great environment for worship and reflection
thanks for being apart of this journey of faith in hollywood as we have celebrated easter we look forward to coming back together for pentecost on may 10th when brian will be speaking on, “true community.” thanks for being apart of this journey of faith in hollywood.
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we’ll, we’re exhausted. and giddy with anticipation. here are just a few pictures of our team gearing up to pass out almost 3,000 postcards to the city of hollywood, along with some One Thing Hollywood grocery bags advertising our first public service.
this week will be a flurry of activity and running around like chickens with our heads cut off. so, pray for us please. this is only the beginning and our prayer is to simply love God and be obedient to His call for this church. we love you guys so much!
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some pictures of an art festival held down our street…
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well, i don’t know where i have been since january but i missed you. matt’s parents took us on a 4 day vacation last month and after all the fun and relaxing, something strange happened. we came home. home! you don’t realize someplace is home until you leave it for a little while only to come back and get so excited by the familiar smell of your bed sheets. or the sound of traffic outside your window. or the orchestra of guitars, cellos, accordions and trumpets coming from our upstairs neighbor and his band. home! of all places…
the last few weeks of church planting have been a challenge for us. i dare not pretend that things on this adventure are always peachy and nice. it is an adventure, after all, and most of those triumphant joyous times start with a slow crawl from the bottom. a lot of our struggle comes from our own brains. we think too much. sometimes we sit and think and this ugly nest of doubt and worry builds up right on top of our heads. it’s itchy, this nest. but it keeps our heads warm so sometimes we don’t mind being uncomfortable. but one can’t walk around with a nest on his head because it’s just silly and unfashionable. so pray for us, please. we love your prayers.
we are also about to say goodbye to our dear friend, eva. we love eva. she has to go back to hong kong as the market has left her without a job here in the states. we have prayed and fasted over her situation and for many of our friends who are unemployed and sometimes it’s hard to understand why those prayers weren’t answered the way we’d hoped. but we know that eva has a purpose whether it be in hollywood with us or in hong kong, so even through our sadness we are so happy that she is a child of God who is so full of faith.
spring is here. i think. i say i think because it SMELLS like spring here and things are budding up from the ground and the squirrels have come out to taunt yagi outside our fence. we’d been boarded up in our apartment for the last week trading off colds so it was great for the rain to let up and allow me to get out into our yard and do some “gardening” the other day. i say “gardening” because i don’t really have a patch of land to dig into – our yard is this strange clay/cement/gravel stuff that our landlord put down to be more environmentally friendly. i suppose it saves on water, but there really isn’t anything earthy about it at all. anyway, so all my gardening happens in pots which i’m not going to complain about because i planted things!! and they aren’t dead yet!!
my tomato plant from this last summer gave me 1 single roma tomato. and this tomato was celebrated as if it were a debutante. we hosted a parade for it, shined it up and matt delivered a short speech before we ate it atop a salad. i think my tomato plant thought it had served it’s purpose after all the grandeur so it died shortly after:
my herb garden also got woody and sad looking, so yagi ate the rest of the basil and we replaced my rail garden with some kale and these yellow flowers that i forgot the name of. i also replaced my forlorn tomato plant with some jade which i think will be a lot harder for me to kill. we’ll see about that.
we love you guys.
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Erin is taking the month off from blogging but don’t worry, she will be back next month. Enjoy the pics!
Our dear friend Jeremy Ezell wanted us to watch a sunset over the ocean for him. So Erin and I drove down to Santa Monica to watch the sun drop seemingly into the watery depths.
As you wish Jeremy. How amazing is God’s creation!?!
About 17 of us came back after the Christmas Celebration Service on Dec. 14th to wrap gifts and make cards for 16 area children we adopted for the holiday season. We were really happy with the turnout and so excited people stayed hours afterward!
This is Ashwin. He is in line to be One Thing’s drummer. This man has a degree in drumming…drumming!
Our friends Tim and Jodi Fleenor came to visit Los Angeles and Tim used his amazing picture taking skills to make us look cool. This is our favorite, the picture is taken just outside our front door on Heliotrope Drive/Santa Monica Blvd.
We love you all and wish you could be here. In fact, come and visit us and see us and the church for yourselves. We would love it!
adios
the church is becoming more and more church every day. sometimes on sunday nights i look around at all the people gathered in our living room – lovely, brilliant, inspiring, beautiful people – and think how unbelievable it is that we’ve only been here 3 months and already there are roots here. i must confess to you all that october was a really hard month for us – not within our ministry, but with everything else it seemed. everything that should have gone smoothly, didn’t. and everything that shouldn’t have happened, did. and maybe just for a teensy second i wanted to throw the covers over my head and wait for life to pass me by. but all these lovely people just showed up on our doorstep one day. and who wants to be under the covers when there are lovely people at your doorstep?
i wish you all were here on sunday nights to see it. i think of all of you often on sunday nights. of how you, too, are part of this church and how we can feel your prayers and love over people you’ve never met before. and it makes me joyful and it also makes me long to have all of you in one room all at the same time. which is probably my heart aching for heaven. sometimes when we walk around this city and see the brokenness, we pine for heaven. but we get a glimpse of it as our church family grows closer with each other, how our hearts are burdened in unity for this city and when we remember that our connection to each other is a common thirst for jesus.
matt and i have been slowly inching our way outside of our block for a little exploring. there is so much to see and do here that it takes baby steps to overcome the chaos of it all. this week we found nature. NATURE!
just a few minutes from our place. can you believe it? not just a patch of grass or a scraggly little tree, but hills and canyons and rocks and bushes and rattlesnakes and cacti. earth! and we discovered that if we walk to the highest point of the canyon, we can actually breathe fresh air. i’m laughing as i write this, but it’s true.
last year i prayed that God would give us a more simple life. not an easy one or less busy one, but a more simple one. i had no idea what this looked like tangibly, but my soul longed for it, so i asked. and He gave one to us. in los angeles, of all places. matt and i have found that we have so much less than we ever did in dallas, but our lives seem full in this simplicity. we are so thankful for that.
we hope your christmas is simple but full this year. we love you.
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a video erin and i created about hollywood
roller-coaster. hills and valleys. building an airplane in flight. mowing a sidewalk.
we heard so many analogies of church planting before we started this adventure, but we never really got it ’til we got here. and i suppose that we actually only get a tiny speck of it. which they warned us about. and which we’re okay with.
everyone keeps asking us how we’re adjusting, and typically we say that we’re adjusting just fine. which is true. but i think the question implies that someday we’ll be adjusted. and i don’t think we’ll ever be truly adjusted, we’ll always be adjusting. on hard days, i feel desperate to cling to something solid. something tangible. something consistent. a schedule, or a building, or a number, or a promise of success. but i have a feeling that even if we had any one of those things, this adventure would still feel like swimming in chocolate pudding.
which always brings me back to my Father. and i’m reminded that all of this swimming in pudding business has nothing to do with us and everything to do with Him. and boy is He moving. despite our doubts, our pride, our worry, our mistakes… our Father is bringing people to One Thing. our church is growing, doors are opening, prayers are being answered and lives are being healed and nurtured. we need to stop and reflect on all of this because it’s easy to get pudding in your eyes and up your nose. and before you know it we forget Who we’re swimming to in the first place.
in other news, it’s been stinking hot here lately. do i dare compare it to dallas? maybe. without air conditioning our apartment now houses two very sweaty, very sticky individuals and a poor dog who seeks refuge on the bathroom tile.
having the windows open doesn’t help much because the california breeze seems to have taken a vacation somewhere and didn’t leave a note. but even without the breeze we’ve had a friend come by the window as of late:
the banana tree outside always wants to come in. even when i tell it that it’s much cooler out there than it is in here, but i suppose it must be lonely. last week our other banana tree (matt and i assume that the two were good friends) was mowed down by a drunk guy on a bicycle. a hit and run. so now the lonely banana tree finds good company by poking its leaf into our window.
the heat this week has also been really great for ripening fruit. my aunt gave us some persimmons on monday and by tuesday they were already incredibly ripe from the heat:
i have a feeling that matt and i are really ripe too.
love you and miss you guys!
hi.
i’m currently sitting in our “study.” which is basically an open closet type space with a tiny desk attached to our living room. the desk is too tall for me, so i’m using one of matt’s bible concordances as a booster seat. my apologies to author james strong – i promise if i had a phonebook i would have used it instead! although i’m sure there is a large network of people who work really hard to put the phonebook together. so maybe we just need to get a taller chair.
anyway. this is our first official blog as church planters in hollywood. we’ve been visiting a lot of churches in the area over the last few weeks and every time we introduce ourselves to people, we tell them we’re planting a church. and it still sounds really strange and foreign and even crazy. but despite all of our doubts and fears, we just know we’re supposed to be here. which is comforting when we look around us and feel like fish out of water.
we found an apartment in east hollywood off santa monica boulevard. the building is old and recently went under renovation – it is the epitome of bohemian. we really love it… and after a few coats of paint, some furniture from random garage sales and loved ones, it definitely feels like home. we’ve mostly fallen in love with our neighbors. there are 12 units in our complex and all of us have moved in within the last 2 weeks. we have an actor/singer songwriter above us (who has serenaded us many a night), a web designer for disneyland, a producer, an engineer, city planner… a nice mishmash of people. it’s such great community already. it reminds me of a college dorm with everyone coming in and out of our apartment asking for this or that. sometimes asking for nothing but a bite of our cantaloupe.
hollywood is a strange, beautiful land. of course the latter is not literal. the land itself is congested and dirty and polluted. but the people and the art and the chaos and the noise is beautiful. if i think too hard i start to become overwhelmed with all the possibilities of adventures we’ll discover here. right now we’re just trying to get to know our block. figure out where the good grocery stores are. find the farmer’s market everyone keeps telling us about. get over the fact that it costs $3.50 to wash one load of laundry at our laundry mat.
and we miss you. every day.
which is the reason for this blog, and we hope somehow it takes you on this adventure from where you’re sitting. and maybe someday you’ll stop by our back door and ask for a bite of our cantaloupe.
until then, hugs and kisses via the internets.
gotta love the internets.
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shake it like a polaroid picture.
what?
