Packing, Moving, and Breaking Ground

            

            Now that I’ve caught you up on our birthday trip for this year, I thought I’d catch you up on other things we’ve enjoyed recently!

            This summer has been a big one for our church. Our pastor is taking a sabbatical, which is a big thing in and of itself, but in addition to that, we also finally started the building project that has been in the planning stages for years!

            The project has multiple phases. We’ve run out of room in our sanctuary, so it’s growing! (Isn’t that a great problem to have?) We’re borrowing room that had been classroom and office space to make the sanctuary larger. Then we’ll build a whole new portion of the building to house offices and even more classrooms.

            So back in June, we had to pack up and move things out to ready the space for all its expansion. Ryan and I weren’t part of the packing, but we did help on the actual moving days. The first of the moving days happened right after boot camp, so we were nice and warmed up. I grabbed this picture of Ryan moving a copier, and he found me moving chairs. I was trying to look like I was power-lifting, but it just came out looking angry. Whoops.

            The second moving day took place on a rainy Saturday morning! I didn’t get any pictures of us heavy-lifting that day, but my friend, Holly, got these while we were waiting on instructions!

            After the moving that day, we helped serve lunch, so I have a couple of pictures from that.

            The last Sunday in June, we had a groundbreaking ceremony to commemorate the official start of this adventure.

            Ryan passed out programs.

            Several people from our church, who represented a variety of ages and positions in church leadership turned over shovels of dirt.

            It was a privilege to get to serve as a reader, alongside my friends Julie and Bridgette.

            All of the service leading up to the end was meaningful to me in beautiful ways, but it was the very end of the service that I will never ever forget.

(Photo Credit: Yellow Creek Photography)

            The service had music and a short message, Scripture reading, and the groundbreaking, and when all that was done, the congregation spread out over the portion of ground that will hold the new part of the building. We were invited to pray over it.

            As we did so, different people from the congregation read prayers that we had written on our very last Sunday in the sanctuary before we relocated for the duration of construction.

            Something about seeing all these people spread out to pray over a church space yet to come and listening to the words written by members of our own church was so powerful.

            Here are my two heart-impacting pictures that I will probably print and keep on my desk. I grabbed this one with my phone in a hurry before I began to pray. I realized later that the sunlight made a cross, and I wanted to cry at the symbolism and beauty of it all.

            The photographer covering the night in an official, non-cell-phone capacity took this, and it is one of my favorite pictures ever taken of us – and neither of us knew it was happening at the time.

(Photo Credit: Yellow Creek Photography)

            God has used this whole journey to do beautiful things in my heart, and I’m sure He’s not done. I am so thankful to be part of this church and to get to share worship with this crew each week. They encourage me!