Unanswered

We joined a small group at our new church. Last night was our first meeting, and everyone seemed pretty low-key and normal.  I'm resisting the urge to assign a value factor to this first meeting, but I did get a positive vibe from the experience.  We'll be heading back in the near future to meet up with them again and see if this is the right small group for us.

But that's not the point of this post. For a few months now, we've been in the process of "moving on" from our previous church to a new church. Joining the new small group was just one piece of trying to make this puzzle. Prior to joining FCC, we weren't thinking about leaving our LifeGroup. At least not yet. But the new small group met on the same day, same time as our previous LifeGroup, and we can't be two places at once. Deciding to be pro-active about the situation (since we'd never heard anything one way or another about our old LifeGroup starting back up again this fall), Brian sent an e-mail to the leader last week, on Sunday. He explained that we'd left CBC and joined another church over the summer, and that we were joining a small group there. Coincidentally, but for another reason, I had sent an e-mail to another member of the group explaining the same thing. Our e-mails were polite and nice. We read each other's messages. No edge at all. It's been over a week, and we have never heard anything back.

Nothing.

Not even the polite sort of "sorry to see you go" response. The kind you send even if you aren't sorry to see someone go. Just... nothing.

Crickets chirping can be so loud.

We're not really all that surprised to have heard nothing. Brian decided last night that we need to stop feeling sad or offended about it, and keep pushing forward. Maybe, he said, God is using their lack of response to our leaving the group as a means to reinforce the reasons we're leaving and moving on. Even though this complete lack of response is hard, I don't have any more energy to pour into this situation. I'm so tired. I'm exhausted.

I've tried not to take this lack of connecting in a meaningful way personally, which is very, very hard for me not to do. I read a quote today that said "It doesn't take long to realize that if you're just passing through, people will only give you passing interest." It resonated with me, but not quite in the way the author intended. We are not just passing through here. We are trying to be part of this big, rather unfriendly place. We are trying to enmesh ourselves in community, choosing to be with people and live as believers. It's not as if we were just passing through at our church, either. We were there for several years. When we came to the realization sometime around Christmas that we were still outside, we had to make some hard decisions. And the main decision was that we needed to move on. At that point I started to withdraw myself from the the communities I was part of. I stopped attending MOPS (which I was only sporadically attending anyway), and finished out the semester of my Bible study small group on Wednesday mornings. We attended church as long as our LifeGroup met, and stopped when it ended for the summer. Now we are somewhere else. Colorado is fine, but has so far proven to be a tough nut to crack. I have to believe that God has good things in store for our future, but I have no idea what they are or where they'll take place. Who knows how we'll feel in another year. The same? I hope not.

**On a side note, I need to stop writing about this. I've come to the conclusion that I'm a complainer at heart, which is something I need to change. And, at this point, I'm just complaining. It's taken over a week for me to push the "publish" button. Sorry for one more post on this subject, but I have to get it out.**