grace

Good morning, Reader.  Today is a day off.  So much has happened recently... allow me to elaborate:

We have to move.  Our landlord basically decided he wanted to live in our apartment to "manage the building better," which might be true but, after being fed this excuse for a few weeks, we later found out from our neighbor downstairs that he's had his eye on our specific apartment for a while and now that he's getting a divorce and our lease is expiring, the time has come for us to get the boot.  Can I just say that we JUST moved in here??  We JUST GOT HERE!  We JUST moved the piano in here!  And now we have to move it all out again by the end of the month.  So, so frustrating, particularly because the process of finding a new place and packing up has suddenly become THE thing that is sucking up all my time and money.  Ugh, I try not to be too frustrated about the whole issue but you know, when you're the one directly affected by someone else's selfish decisions, it's hard not to be a little burned up inside.

We did find a place in Webster Groves... I know, right?  We're moving from Tower Grove to Webster Groves.  From Grove to Groves lol.  And it hopefully will be for the best in the long run because our apartment here is already freezing and it's only November.  Our bills this winter would be insane if we actually wanted to stay warm.  Supposedly the apartment in Webster has really low utilities because it's a loft situated over a downstairs business, which will be great when there's six inches of snow outside and the Ameren bill comes.  And moving to Webster will shave off about 10 mins of my commute out to Lutheran three days a week, which will be fantastic.  So there are a lot of positives... it just sucks right now.

In the midst of all this, God is so good.  I now have 10 students with another 2 potentials on the way and my Wednesday student is going to bump up to hour-lessons next month.  Because when you start going over with your students on a regular basis, then they either need to bump up their time so you can be adequately compensated... or you just need to be firm about cutting things off when their time is up each week.  I actually need to have this conversation with at least two of my other families who I've been going over with in lessons consistently now since the beginning of the semester.  And I have Halley to thank for helping me be a brave and shrewd businesswoman:  she's the one who told me to stop treating it like such a delicate situation, man up, and tell people what I want.  Because if you act like it's a delicate situation, then people feel they have the right to walk all over you.  But if you just own it and speak up and mean what you say, then even if your kids' parents say they want to keep the same lesson length, then at least you know you need to change something.

And the church I've been going to recently has been so good for my heart.  It's been really difficult the last two months for me to be consistent on Sunday mornings, given that I still go see my counselor in Columbia once a month on a Sunday morning and am required to play for the Lutheran HS concert choir once a month at the different Lutheran churches around the St. Charles area.  So that's two Sunday mornings a month gone.  But the last month or so I've been going to what basically amounts to a church within a church at Central Presbyterian.  They call themselves Trio and they meet on Sunday evenings in the basement of Central.  The music is great (more of a relaxed jazz combo style of revamped Presbyterian hymns), they incorporate liturgical elements into the service, the teaching is fantastic, and I can wear jeans without feeling like I've violated some unwritten dress code.  It is quite possibly one of the best and most wonderful things that has happened to me since coming to St. Louis.  I feel like I've found a miniature version of the Crossing, which is huge because it was something I was really worried about when leaving Columbia (cue flashback thought to July: "What am I gonna do??  I'm never going to find a church remotely like this again...").

For instance, one thing I've really struggled with lately is anger... anger toward my parents over stuff in the past, as well as stuff in the present... anger with this guy that things didn't work out with recently... just a lot of anger in general (cue flashback conversation with Halley: "... at this point Hal, I'm just trying to figure out who I'm not angry with").  And one Sunday evening a couple of weeks ago I went to Trio struggling with all of this and of course, they were going to have communion at the end of the service and I sat there remembering a sermon I'd heard weeks before at a different church about taking the Lord's Supper in an unworthy manner... like if you have anger in your heart towards a fellow believer... or in my case, fellow believers.  And then the pastor started talking about the Lord's Supper and how it's symbolic of Christ offering himself to us.  And then I realized that this was the first time in my life I'd ever taken communion with the awareness that I would be taking it in what I felt to be an unworthy manner... but that somehow it was ok because that was the entire point of the cross in the first place:  that we bring all our struggles to him... all of our anxieties (and in this case my anger) to him and groan something within to the effect of "I know that I'm struggling with this but I've heard that you, God, are a God who offers yourself and your presence to us anyway and so I'm going to choose to take you at your word."  It's a powerful realization right before you're about to take communion.  And although this sounds cliche, when you've been hit afresh with grace recently in a meaningful way, you realize again that what's even more beautiful is that he offers this to us daily, if we would only come to him and his word, being real with both ourselves and him... putting away all pretense and take from him what he freely gives, which is himself.  What a savior.