When we applied for The World Race, I never thought leaving would actually be so hard. Don’t get me wrong, I knew leaving our family and friends wouldn’t be easy. I just thought after Erin graduated from college in December, we’d pack up our house, spend time with our families, and then embark on the adventure God brought to us. We had no idea about five families God was going to bring into our lives that would change us forever.
Shortly after Erin and I got married, God led us to Lifechurch.tv. We were very excited about getting involved and meeting new people. Unfortunately being excited about getting involved didn’t fill the void we were experiencing from not being involved. You see, at Lifechurch.tv we have small groups called LifeGroups. These groups meet together outside of the corporate worship experience. We have groups for specific genders, couples, singles, divorced, young, old, hobbies, and many more. I won’t lie, it’s a little intimidating coming to a big church and trying to find the right group on your own, but we were “excited” about it remember? So after a few months of excitement and excuses we actually made an effort to start looking at LifeGroups. We talked to someone who was serving in the LifeGroup area after church one Sunday. We thought we found a group that looked promising, but it was right before Thanksgiving so the group wasn’t going to meet for another week. They had trouble getting everyone together over the holidays, and after the new year started we never heard from them. So to make a short story shorter, the group didn’t really work out for us.
When Erin started back to school in January, rowing practice kicked back into gear. Practice, travel, and regattas became what we scheduled life around. Rowing never took priority over God; we were just really busy. So rowing and the fact that our first attempt to get involved didn’t exactly work out, really slowed down out efforts to get involved at church. After rowing was over we finally decided that we were going to do whatever it took to find a group of people that we could do life with. We contacted the leader of a group and made plans to visit the next week. After the first night we knew that God had brought us right where he wanted us to be.
This past Wednesday night our LifeGroup all went to a Christmas Eve service together. After the service we got together for our last meeting with the group. There have been several experiences we’ve had over the past couple months that have been bittersweet. I had already made up my mind that this night would be the same, but it was different. Words can’t describe the blessings that God poured down on us through our group that night. We’ve grown to develop deep loving relationships with these people, and we’ll never be the same. They have supported us with prayer, encouragement, and financial blessings from day one. We never could have imagined that we would be leaving this special of a group. We are eternally grateful for each one of them.
-drew
