planting in hollywood

growth

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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