community brew vol. 4: gratitude

Please excuse how blurry this is. I'm slowly saving for a DSLR but we are mostly focused on saving for a down payment on a house. I think trading blurry pictures for an open concept and big porch is an excellent deal.

Every month I love sitting down with my morning coffee and my friends Rachel and Madison, and this month, Martha Kate, for Community Brew. It is so refreshing to sit in real conversation, discussing our hearts and where they are, and of course, talking about Jesus. This month we're talking about gratitude. I usually post on Wednesdays when this linkup goes life (and in general) but I intentionally waited until this morning to write because something special was happening for us yesterday.
Since moving to Columbia, we have left the church we were members of prior to getting married and for a few months after. We had begun to feel some unrest about it, and eventually decided that some of our core beliefs simply didn't line up with the church's anymore. Finding a new church has been...challenging.
But. Oh the joy I have writing this out. We have found it. We've found the church home we've been looking for. It's an Acts 29 church plant (read more about the network here) called Riverside Community Church and is exactly right. It's smallish, doesn't make use of too much technology, has no webcasting of sermons, something we've found we enjoy as it has kept the church feeling so much more communal, and yet so welcoming. The music is acoustic, just a few people with voices and instruments worshiping sweetly and simply, and the pastor is such a humble servant. It's everything we had hoped could exist in one church.
After finally deciding this was our church home, we immediately looked for a small group in our region of the city, and found one. We learned yesterday while typing it in to see how far away it was that they meet in our neighborhood, hardly over a mile away.
I was beginning to give up on the idea of us ever finding community here. It has been almost a year, after all, and the only people I really know are those from work, one of my best friends from college, who I never see because she's in pharmacy school, and a girl I sort of knew indirectly in high school who now lives in our neighborhood. Our other friends moved away with our sweet godson, so it's been pretty lonely here.
But last night, sitting in the dining room of the nicest couple while kids ran around playing together, everyone singing before starting to discuss, and then staying around talking long after the formal gathering was over, it felt so right. There were people from so many stages of life. Some were in college, some married with babies, some with young kids, some with teenagers, even a sweet grandmother, and some other twenty somethings not yet married. It was such a wonderful thing to be in a mixture of people from so many life stages. So many people who may not have much in common but love the Lord and each other. It was wonderful.
So today, I'm on my knees in deepest gratitude. This new church and potential community is an answer to a long repeated prayer. Sometimes when things don't happen on my timeline, I turn to God and say, "Why aren't you showing up? Where are you? Nothing is happening like it's supposed to!" And without fail, when I'm ready to give up on him, he shows me once again that he is always, always right. And for that, I am so deeply thankful.
What are you thankful for today? Have you gone through seasons like this before?