Living in the Fish Bowl

Ahh they warned us about this. Kind of. Seminary professors and pastor friends had told us that once you're in ministry, you and your family will begin living life in a fish bowl. And a box. Everyone has an expectation for how you will behave, raise your children, conduct your marriage, how you do or do not voice opinions etc. There are expectations for what you "should" believe about certain things, and how quiet one's wife should remain. If you're reading this, it's because you actually know me, in person, and well, some of you may already be chuckling to yourselves about me being the quiet, submissive, non-opinionated wife of a youth pastor. Yeah...that's not exactly what our church got when they hired my husband. Instead, they got me. (Which I think is pretty great!) Most people don't seem to have a problem with who I am, or my education, or my opinions (well at least not that they've told me to my face yet!), but we're quickly learning that there are several who do. Most of these are individuals who haven't really ever had a conversation with me, but who have strong opinions about me already because they didn't like what they've seen of my writing. I feel strange about that. These are people who I am called to be in community with, and they already don't like me because I might have written opinions about youth ministry that differ from theirs (they don't help with the youth group...but that is a completely different story...). So a few weeks ago, I just stopped writing. I have all kinds of things I want to write about, but am beginning to feel rather hesitant to share my opinions. When people are forwarding what I have to say to our senior pastor, complaining about the crazy opinions of the youth pastor's wife, and then it's coming up in my husband's 3 month job performance review, I feel like a line has been crossed and the point of a blog has been missed. Granted I'm one of two people I know here who actually have a blog, so I realize this just isn't part of the culture of this community, which is fine, but I'm not sure I'm ready for my writing to be made an example.

Everytime I have sat down to write in the past couple weeks I can't come up with anything to say that I'm comfortable with our congregation reading. I don't feel like I can give an honest life update about how things are going. I don't even think I can honestly review the book I'm reading now without being labeled a heretic if I say I like it. For six years now this has been my place to share thoughts, updates, reflections, photos, and stories, and it's always felt comfortable--even if total strangers were reading what I had to say I never felt judged or misunderstood.

So I had a couple of choices. My husband wishes I'd just keep writing and not worry about what people think, he hates that I feel like I'm being censored or silenced. A woman literally showed up in his office the other day & told him she wishes his wife would learn to write with more discression. It took everything in his power not to tell her exactly what he thought! I wasn't ready to stop blogging altogether. I love it. I miss writing. I don't want to quit. I thought about making the blog private, where you'd have to enter a password to read what I've written, but I didn't think that sounded like fun--that was going to be a lot of work to figure out who wanted access and to grant each of you access! So after talking with a couple fellow bloggers also in ministry, I came up with this. I transfered everything from the old blog here, onto this one. I've taken our full names and the name of our church and location off the blog, and disabled google from being allowed to search for it. (Which means you can't find it if you just type my name and "blog" into google). I won't be sharing this address with anyone in the church community. I don't need my thoughts forwarded around the church staff any longer. I'm not putting the address on facebook, nor will I be linking new posts to facebook, so you'll have to check back or change your subscription in google reader if you do want to keep up with us :) We've only been here a couple months, but I've already found myself hurt by being a bit too open with people who I thought were trustworthy. Unfortunately I'm learning the hard way that churches aren't always the nicest places when it comes to accepting people's opinions that might be different from how things have always been done.

I hope you'll continue reading. We have had a big year so far and my guess is that it's only going to continue being a crazy adventure through the rest of 2011! Blessings my friends!

Lights, Camera, Auction!

Saturday was the dinner and auction at church to raise money for the Dominican Republic mission trip. It was quite the event! Enjoy a few photos from the set up portion of the evening (I was busy doing stuff during the auction so didn't get any photos from it).

The stage set up. It was a Hollywood theme, so the 10 girls who are going on the trip walked the red carpet in prom dresses to be introduced.

The tables all set

The girls receiving their serving instructions

Silent auction tables set up

Auction booklets and bid numbers all set out for registration

Photos from the past DR trips. We hand colored all those little black squares to make a film strip--definitely took awhile!