This waiting thing is very hard, but at the same time it gives me a tiny picture of what we’re supposed to be doing as we wait for Christ’s return.  Appropriate, given the Advent season.  The difference is, we know what will happen when Christ comes, more or less.  The details might not be clear, but we know we’re going to heaven to be with Him.  This time of waiting is tough because we have no idea what the outcome is.  We don’t know what the other people involved are thinking or doing, or what their perspective is.  So we sit and wait and make assumptions about the situation, and wonder if we’re completely wrong about what is going on here.

Yesterday, for the first time in three weeks, someone involved with this entire process asked me directly how I’m doing.  I’ve had lots of people ask the question via facebook, email, etc., but no one involved in this mess asked me until yesterday.  He said he knows this is hardest on me.  Yet in the midst of everything, I’ve felt like I don’t really exist.  Travis has been very good about being there for me as much as he can, but he’s spending a lot of time in prayer (as he should) and truthfully is feeling pretty low himself most days.  So that’s why I turned to those of you I can reach online.  Being a pastor’s wife is a pretty lonely gig, I have to say.  Most of the time I’m ok with that.  I tend to live mostly in my own head anyway, and I’m content with just thinking and praying and passing time.  I like my alone time.

One of the tough things for me in the past three weeks is that I’ve had precious little alone time.  Not that I am upset by it, but I find myself falling behind on things that normally don’t plague me, like laundry.  I may not be the best with other household tasks, but I usually find time to get the laundry done.  It’s hard to keep any semblance of routine going when another person is there who needs me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a woman from our old congregation lately.  The first few weeks we were there, she went up to my husband and told him, “I’m not praying for you.  You have enough people doing that.  I’m praying for your wife instead.”  Boy, do I miss her these days!

And I know it’s not about me.  I’m realizing that all of the lessons I’ve been learning from God over the years about forgiveness are needed most right now.  Whether others have actually hurt us or it’s just our perception of them hurting us, I still need to forgive them.  Holding onto hurt won’t change anything that’s happened, nor will it help me or empower me in any way.  It’s in releasing the hurt and giving it over to God that I find freedom.

So we continue to wait.  Come Lord Jesus!  Come quickly, please!

While I don’t get too attached to traditional worship forms, I do have to say that I love the collects (pre-written liturgical prayers) for Advent.  I think all but one of them begins with “Stir up Your power O Lord, and come…”  That is the prayer of my heart right now.

I have three categories for this blog:  Ministry, Personal, and Uncategorized.  I don’t really use the third one, I think it’s a default setting.  But the first two I created because some stuff I write about is ministry related and some is personal.  Lately the two have been colliding big time.

The roller coaster continues to cycle.  We have had so many ups and downs throughout the past few weeks that it’s hard for me to discern what’s going on at any point in time.  Yesterday I was to the point that I was swearing off being a pastor’s wife entirely.  Not that I would leave my husband, but that I don’t want to be present at any church, ever again, in that role.  I’m so tired of having to pretend to be more outgoing than I actually am, to force myself to interact with people when my preference is to just blend in, and to join in activities I’d rather not, all for the sake of my husband’s ministry.  Because in the end, none of that does any good.  If Satan wants to destroy a man’s ministry, he will do everything in his power to do it.  I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but it’s sure felt like it several times.

Hope is on the horizon, this much I do know.  Things should be settled this week, and we’ll know what is going to happen either way.  What hurts is that we have tried our best to not triangulate (draw others into the conflict) and badmouth, yet because we’re not operating that way, we’re the ones who seem to be losing.  I hate it when evil tactics seem to win the day.

I’m a huge fan of Casting Crowns (I think I’ve said that before, maybe in my last post even, I can’t remember), and so much of their music keeps running through my head.  It’s no coincidence that we went to their concert a couple of weeks before this happened and got their newest CD in the mail days before the mess started.  God knew I needed to hear His voice through their music.  Here are some of the titles that have meant the most to me lately:

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”

“If We’ve Ever Needed You”

“Stained Glass Masquerade”

“Praise You in This Storm”

There are others of course, but these have meant the most to me.  I highly recommend them (well, really, any of their music).  Thanks, Kim, for introducing me to them.

Keep praying – it really does help!  I am amazed and overwhelmed by the volume of prayer support we are receiving from everyone across the country.  Facebook is not just for networking.  God can use it too!

So once again I’ve gone forever since posting.  It started with me not having much to write about.  Then I had an issue with someone hacking into one of my old email accounts and asking everyone in my contact list for money.  So I changed lots of my passwords, and couldn’t remember the password to my blog.  Now I’ve got that resolved, too.  Hopefully I won’t go so long again, and hopefully some of you out there have a blog reader so you haven’t forgotten all about this.

I’m asking for prayers right now.  We are going through some very difficult things at church, stuff I need to keep confidential both for our sake and to avoid breaking the 8th commandment.  If I can down the road, I will share more details, but in the meantime we are in need of your prayers.  Satan is attacking the Church as a whole right now, because we’ve heard news from other churchworkers in other places about struggles as well.  We do know that Travis will continue to be a pastor into the future no matter what happens, but we aren’t sure if it will be here.  It’s currently out of our hands.  Please keep praying for us as we muddle through the uncertainty, especially during this time of the year.  While the situation is being figured out, we have been instructed to stay away from the church and to not interact with members so that we avoid the pitfalls of triangulation.  This is especially difficult when it’s Christmastime and we’re already far away from family, and the church family is all we have.  We haven’t gotten to know a lot of people in the area yet outside of the congregation.  But God is faithful.  Last night when we were feeling particularly sad, phone calls kept coming in from the most unexpected places, friends from far and near who reached out to us.

I have to confess to those of you enroute that we were in Nebraska over Thanksgiving and did drive out there.  I know there are a few of you who would have liked to see us, but we were dealing with a lot of uncertainty already and just needed to be with family.  So Jim and Gail, if you read this, I’m sorry for not contacting you about the change in plans.  I hope you can understand.

Needless to say, when all of this is said and done, I will have a lot to write about, what it’s like to go through such a difficult dark time in ministry.  Please keep praying for us, it’s such a help.

Oh, I’m at it again.  Falling behind on writing and forgetting to post.  Then I wonder why nobody’s reading this thing anymore.  Gee, why would that be the case?  I’m alive and well, just been busy and traveling again.  This trip was actually planned, believe it or not, well in advance.  My grandparents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last weekend (technically the date was October 2, but they had the party on the 10th.  We traveled to Nebraska and saw my dad’s whole side of the family, pretty much.  It’s weird how much his siblings’ families have fractured over the years.  I have six first cousins on that side, five of whom were at the party, plus me and my sister.  But I hadn’t seen any of them since we were kids, really.  I can’t actually remember the last time I saw any of them.  All of my dad’ds sibblings have been divorced (two of them have two divorces behind them, the other one).  My aunt is actually on husband number 4 as her 3rd husband died a couple of years ago.  Most of this was details that I was already aware of.  But my oldest cousin is separated from his wife, and while one could attribute that to being the child of divorce, his parents didn’t actually split up until he was long out of the house! I just share all of this as facts, however, knowing that the circumstances behind marriages ending are as various as the stars in the sky.  I don’t pretend to know what these families have gone through, as I hardly know the individuals involved!

That’s one of those things that is weird for me.  I barely know some of my family, and I guess this should bother me more than it does.  But we’re separated by geography and circumstances and just plain not knowing one another.  I can’t imagine what their image is of me and my sister, since we were not only pastor’s kids but also married pastors.

On top of all of this, my sister and her husband drove down for the anniversary, left the party early to drive home to South Dakota, and his last Sunday was the 11th.  The moving van came Monday morning and they moved into their new house in Wisconsin Wednesday.  So despite my life feeling a bit busy, I’m experiencing nothing compared to the chaos that is my sister’s life right now.

Meanwhile, I am determined to get back into a routine (I think I’ve written that before…).  Today’s Friday which is always a weird day to try to get things done, but since I have to put together my lesson plan for Sunday’s Bible study and also plan a skeleton idea of worship for November 1st so the praise team can practice on Tuesday, I guess it won’t be a typical Friday for me.  Monday will include a staff meeting and a dentist appointment (the 8th one this year, I think, or is it 9th?).  But I can handle it, I’m just going to bring my stuff to work on for worship and Bible study and stay in Hudson for the day.

As for the title of this post, it’s from an episode of Gilmore Girls.  The characters are talking about how funny the words “Oy” and “poodle” are.  Since I saw my grandma’s poodle this week, it seems appropriate.

I thought for a long time this summer that we just weren’t very busy.  Stuff was moving slowly, we had lots of time on our hands.  Now that school has started again I’ve realized that we’re actually quite busy.  Invitations from members keep coming up, lots of activities to get involved with at church, and several Bible studies besides.

For example, last week we had the following activities: on Tuesday, I went to a women’s Bible study in the morning.  Wednesday came with apple picking with one member and dinner with members that evening (the dinner was actually cancelled last minute but still counts as a scheduled event).  Thursday my husband had men’s chorus in the evening and Friday we had dinner at a member’s house.  Saturday we went to a party at another member’s house, and Sunday we hosted our first small group meeting.

Now we’re at today – we are getting together with some people from church to plan some stuff for Friday (more later on that).  Tomorrow is the make-up for the dinner from last week, then Wednesday I have choir and Thursday he has men’s chorus.  Friday we’re having a house warming party for the church and his family and some friends.  Whew!  I haven’t even thought about Saturday or Sunday yet, but next week we fly to Nebraska (again, I know!) for my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary.  Such a lot going on.  In the meantime, I’m trying to get household stuff done even though my washing machine is possessed (or at the very least, broken).  Currently the power is off, and I can open and shut the front-loader door, but the indicater light says that the door is locked, something that should only be true while a cycle is running and prevents me from opening the door.  This is in addition to the fact that it doesn’t want to start sometimes without being unplugged to reset it (although we can’t reach the plug since the washer and dryer are in a tight-fitted closet, so it requires going down to the basement to turn the breaker on and off).  I’m so frustrated with this machine!

I think I’m one of the slack-est bloggers around.  I keep thinking I will do better with blogging on a regular basis, but truthfully my life isn’t always interesting enough to blog about.  That and then things get busy with travel (again!) so I end up letting this thing sit for days and weeks at a time.

Let’s see, where did I leave off?  It’s been over two weeks and last time I posted I was worried that I was starting to wallow in depression.  I would imagine that some of you have wondered if that’s what’s going on with me.  In truth, I still feel a little of that coming on, but I’m doing ok.  I tend to have what I call a “vocational crisis” about every year or two.  One of the things that has helped me in recent years is the book Pathways to Purpose for Women by Katie Braselton.  So I grabbed that off the shelf and am reading it for probably the fourth time.  While I’m not one to jump on the Purpose Driven Life bandwagon, she’s actually a staff member at Saddleback and part of the Rick Warren group.  This is a different take on being purpose-driven, though, where it breaks down the journey to vocation into reasonable steps and is geared specifically toward women and our particular needs.

In the meantime, just when I was getting settled back into a routine at home, I got a call from my mom two weeks ago Sunday to tell me that Arlene had passed away.  Arlene was my grandpa’s first cousin, but they were raised together so she was basically my great aunt.  The other family connection is that her husband is actually my grandma’s first cousin, so the family tree kind of doubles back on itself.  When I was growing up, we didn’t do a lot of holiday stuff with my dad’s family.  I haven’t seen any of my first cousins since we were kids.  On my mom’s side, we have no first cousins.  Mom’s only sibbling, a sister, doesn’t have children.  But we did stuff with mom’s family every holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, sometimes other times throughout the year).  So Glenn and Arlene, their two daughters, and their families, were the cousins that I knew best.  This group, plus us, my grandparents, and my aunt, was the extended family I knew and loved.

Arlene has been sick for the last few years, possibly Alzheimers, and was in a nursing home for the past year or so.  She started to decline in the last month, so I wasn’t surprised to get the call.  Thankfully I found an inexpensive flight and headed back west for the third time this year.

On top of all of this, my sister’s husband just accepted a call to a new congregation.  They will be moving from South Dakota to Wisconsin in a few weeks.  So while in Nebraska, I helped her and my mom prepare for a garage sale (she held it at my mom’s house because it’s a bigger town and easier to sell things).

So many transitions.  The year is starting to heat up, with lots of activities at church.  I’ve been teaching Bible study for a couple of weeks now and it’s going well.  I’m also going to be temporarily heading up our church’s praise team, something that scares me as well as makes me excited.  Busy, busy, busy!  Yet not much that sounds interesting enough to blog about regularly.  I’m going to try to get back to my focus of pastors’ wives.  It’s what my life is and will be, and I hope to keep sharing what little wisdom I have related to it.  Thanks for sticking with me!

My husband asked me yesterday what I feel God is calling me to do, since he read my post.  The thing is, I don’t know what it is He is calling me for right now, because I haven’t been listening to Him much lately.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m in worship sometimes twice weekly.  I hear the sermons and find something every time that’s meaningful to me (not just because it’s my husband preaching, either: I’ve actually heard three other people preach in the last month).  I read from the Bible almost every day.  I’ve been preparing for teaching a Bible study starting this Sunday.  I follow a few other Christian blogs.  It’s not like God hasn’t been talking to me.  But I’ve been too scared to really listen and ingest what He’s saying to me.

As a Lutheran, I’ve been taught to be cautious about direct revelation.  Everything we need to know God has revealed to us in His Word.  However, I know that God continues to reveal Himself to us through that Word.  There have been many times in my life where I’ll be reading or hearing the same verse of Scripture I’ve heard a hundred times before, and God will open my eyes to understanding it in a new way.  Some people call it conscience, others intuition.  I know it’s the Holy Spirit guiding me.  That’s what the life of sanctification is all about – being transformed daily into the image of Christ.

But lately I’ve been tuning out the little pokes of the Holy Spirit, or I let them wash over me and then move on with whatever I was already doing.  I know this is a dangerous place to be.  I’ve been here before, and depression is right around the corner.  Satan is good at what he does, convincing me that it’s no big deal until I’m so far steeped in self-loathing that I can’t see the sun.  But I know God is better at what He does – reminding me that I am first and foremost His child.  Every time I’ve been in that dark scary place, God has lifted me out.  Right now I know He’s teaching me how to avoid falling into it in the first place.

Despite my good intentions to go to that exercise class today, I stayed home.  I spent a lot more time in front of the television and playing computer/cell phone games than I would like.  And I could spend the rest of the week beating myself up for that.  I tend to fall into these vicious circles of being lazy, then feeling guilty for being lazy, which makes me feel even more lazy…. you get the picture.  But I’m going to cut myself some slack.  After all, I don’t really HAVE to do the things on my list.  I just don’t want to get into the mind set that I will never do them.  Instead, I’m going to give myself today as a pass, and pick up on things tomorrow.  And hey, I finally got a burst of energy twenty minutes ago or so and finished a lot of my bare minimums (including writing a blog post).  So that is something to celebrate.  In the meantime, I’ve been pondering a couple of other peoples’ blogs today, particularly this one about being brave.  I think that might be part of my problem, I’m too scared to go out on a limb and listen to what God is calling me to do, let alone do it.  Gee, do you think God is calling me to listen right now?

I spend a lot of time by myself.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing in my mind, though I do know that it wears on me after a long time.  I tend to be introverted, so I enjoy the peace and quiet.  In fact, last week was so hectic that I’m looking forward to having a little down time in the next few days.  It helps me reenergize for those times when I have to be around big groups of people.

At the same time, I know it’s not good for me to spend too much time alone.  I get a little bit depressed when I do that.  The good news about that is I’m finding ways to start filling my time with connections.  I’ve realized that the summer around here will be pretty laid back.  Not much goes on because a lot of people from church travel.  All of the “stuff” slows down that we fill our time with.  So I may have to be more proactive in filling summer days than I will during the school year.  This post-Labor day, I am looking to my new-ish weekly schedule.  I find that I have an exercise class three mornings per week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), a Bible study on Tuesday morning, and the potential for two to three evenings a week to be filled with rehearsals, small group, and meetings.  I still have all day Thursday unaccounted for, plus my afternoons.  Why did I think I needed to find a job to fill my time?

I think it’s because I need to have the people connection.  I read an article the other day about telecommuting, talking about how every four hours you should log some face-to-face time with someone, even if it’s just saying hi to the neighbor.  I think I will be covered with my out-of-house stuff, plus walking the dog around our neighborhood.

But all of this has gotten me thinking about how I’m “connected” to a lot of people on Facebook (178 friends as of this writing!  Why?), through reading others’ blogs (I follow somewhere in the ballpark of 15 other blogs, give or take), and sharing my own stuff via this blog (with a handful of readers) and my facebook status (which sometimes gets a comment or two).  Despite all of those supposed connections, I know I’m not really connected to a lot of people.  I know that those of you who read this care about me, as do quite of few of those facebook friends.  But I do know that getting out there and just being with people is the real key to friendships.  We spent the weekend with some friends from our old church who drove down to visit, and it was nice to just socialize for a while.  Sometimes even just being quiet with another person is better than me blabbing my endless thoughts over the internet.  It’s probably why I haven’t joined the Twitter phenomenon yet – I don’t see the point in sharing my status with the world ad naseum.  Yes, I do the status thing on facebook, but that’s merely an occassional thing and not what I see the purpose of that site to be.

Anyway, that’s my rant about this online thing.  I enjoy it, don’t get me wrong.  But I can see the falacy of always being connected.  How ironic, given that I just got an iPhone next week and can facebook, blog, email, or even twitter if I wanted to 24/7, no matter where I am.  It’s probably a good thing I’m realizing this now.

I’m sorry I fell behind on posting stuff this week.  Lots of things happening in my life, all of which left me pretty busy, so busy in fact that I can’t really remember much from Monday or Tuesday, except that Tuesday evening we had dinner with some member and then chatted with them at our house for several hours into the evening.  Next came Wednesday.  That morning was pretty basic, just me getting stuff done around the house, working through my to-do list.  Then I left at 3pm and didn’t return home until after 9.  Thursday was similar, except I left the house around noon, was home briefly to eat dinner, and then left again and didn’t get home until closer to 10.  Yesterday I tried to get a few things done in the morning, followed by an outing with members that lasted from 1 until bedtime.  Whew!

So that sums up the busyness, but I left out two critical pieces of events that transpired this week, but due to their order of importance I’m going to share them in backwards order chronologically.  First, I got an iPhone on Thursday.  We knew we were going to switch cell phone carriers anyway, and AT&T actually paid to get us out of our Verizon contract (I have no beef with Verizon, have loved them for six+ years, but they just don’t have great reception in our area).  I was frustrated because I’ve used a Palm phone for two years now, loving its planning features and to-do list.  I didn’t particularly like any of the AT&T phones except the iPhone but couldn’t justify the extra $30 a month when I’m not working and don’t REALLY need it.  But then we learned from the church secretary that the congregation actually meant all along to include my husband on the church’s cell phone plan, which already is used by the retired visitation pastor, and his wife pays the $10 a month for her line to be added on.  So our numbers got added to it, too, and despite the fact that we’re paying $30 each for our two iPhones (of course Travis got one!) and the $10 for my line, it’s still going to be close to $50 a month LESS than we were paying for a plan by ourselves!  Thank you Gloria Dei!

The second, and more important event that happened this week, is that I’m actually not unemployed anymore (or soon won’t be).  I had mentioned that I was interviewing for the Praise Team director position at our church.  They called me in for a second interview on Wednesday, and I talked to them about my concerns for my limitations.  Because the current director is leaving, I mentioned that I wouldn’t be opposed to taking on the position temporarily while they continued to look for someone with more musical ability to help coach the instrumentalists.  After a brief interview and some private conferring on the part of the team, they offered me the position of Interim Praise Team Director!

There’s something exciting about this, getting to help with planning and leading worship.  In addition, the Interim part of the title gives me a better sense of freedom with this job, that I don’t really need to prove something to the church in order to keep the position.  Everyone knows it’s temporary, which means I can just DO my job.  I tend to get anxious when I’m working about expectations of others, and this really frees me from that burden.  Not that I won’t do my job, don’t get me wrong.  I take it very seriously.  But if someone is bothered by something I do because its “not how we’ve always done it,” I can just shrug and say, “take it up with the permanent person when they’re hired.  This is how we’re going to do it for now.”

The job actually doesn’t start until probably October, to give the current director a chance to have a last Sunday leading and plan for it.  I’ve been filling in when he can’t be there from time to time anyway, including this coming Sunday.  It’s exciting, and I’m looking forward to helping set a new vision for contemporary worship at our church.