This is the third entry in “closing out,” a series where I lay bare some thoughts about our recent transition from the The Dalles, OR to Helena, MT. I started off talking about leaving a workplace and the challenges of leaving a job well. Following that, I finally posted something about our remodel project in The Dalles.
Community is something that we all crave. It pains me to think that some people can go through their entire life and not even know what good community brings to the table. We had it in Bozeman, so we set out searching for it in the Columbia River Gorge when we moved there. We started with finding a church.
We tend to not go crazy deep into our faith stories here, but I think it’s important for some context on this on. Many years ago, we left a church. It was one of the most difficult decisions we had ever made. We were both involved there, I was the worship leader, Jess volunteered in the children’s ministry and we both helped out the youth group. It was dying and there were too few people to actually do something to keep it alive. We made some attempts at some sort of renewal of interest in reaching out into the community that went beyond just keeping the doors open. We had some flickers of hope, but just a flicker. The church was located in another community than we lived in and mostly constituted of people in a different stage in life. It sounds like it should have been easy to leave. There were a couple of families there that were like family to us (and still are), and that was the hard part. Knowing that we’d miss out on weekly fellowship and community with these few precious people was the only thing keeping us there.
And so we left and started the more local search for a church body to call home. After a few visits we ended up at the unorthodox choice of a recently planted church in town. They had only just held a handful of services, were constantly getting kicked out of their spot at the hotel conference center due to double booking, but had energy and engagement to spare as we walked in one morning. It was something new, fresh and most importantly alive! We were welcomed in, and the next week we found ourselves back again and getting to know everyone there. People were inviting us over for dinner, they wanted to do life together. It was amazing. Jess and I started serving again, and loved it!
It was that way for a couple years, but as the church body grew, some growing pains changed the dynamic. The focus became growth. We didn’t see our friends as much, just on Sunday morning and during some events. We were constantly changing up the group of people we were doing life with to encourage “discipleship.” It felt like we were a production line. We knew what genuine community was supposed to be like, but we were focused on systems-based artificial growth. At this point I was even in “senior” leadership and couldn’t steer it back. For brevity, let’s just say we ended up tired. Combine that with a job that wasn’t going well and a cost of living we could no longer afford and we were looking for a way out, of everything.
So jump to church finding/community seeking in the Gorge. Like with our housing, we didn’t know where we’d land, so we looked all over. And by looked, we did Google searches. We still thought we’d end up in Hood River or White Salmon, so we focused our search around there. We heard good things about one, so we went and that was it, we didn’t try any others out. They had community groups that met weekly in The Dalles where we were currently living with Jess’s parents, so we even were able to get a little more community midweek. In some ways it was a lazy decision, but I believe that it is where God wanted us for a season. I think even in those early months in Oregon, we knew that this wasn’t going to be a long season, though from outward experience it looked like we were going to settle down for a while.
We took a much slower approach to getting involved this time, but it was Jess who was roped in first. I was pretty firm on not getting involved and had been practicing saying no for a while. Jess took over leadership on the Nursery team and I eventually started helping out with projection. We had some community, but it was mainly on Sundays and Tuesday evenings. As in all places we’ve ever invested ourselves into, we found some people that made living life better, but it still wasn’t as full as we knew it could be. Part of that was due to us remodeling a house, being on-call, and doing both work and church in a community that was separate from the one we lived in. While we mostly enjoyed our time in the church community, that disconnect of physical location proved difficult for building more relationships.
Now I do have to admit that there were some attitudes that we did bear that also made us a little less approachable. I used to always say yes to just about anything I could aptly do without hesitation, but after years of overextending myself and others capitalizing on my commitment-positive disposition, saying yes was wearisome. This go around I was “yes” averse, only committing to things that were simple, or engaged my creative or technical side directly. I said no, and some people, especially in the church, don’t know what to do with that. People who say yes get more attention by well intentioned people, and that’s fine. I even said no to things I actually enjoyed, but I couldn’t spend any more time apart from my family. My job and existing commitments took too much time already.
And then it happened, I got a new job, in a new town, AGAIN. I have more to say on community and some thoughts around living in The Dalles specifically to wrap up the crazy, long-winded series.