And some news...

The other day I got a notice that a job I had applied for over a year ago was open again. (Well, they never filled it the first time but …) At the time I had convinced myself it was a dream job for me, but when I got the alert, I had no interest in applying for it.

There has been a lingering question about what's next for me, and as August started sneaking up, I had to pay more attention to that. But over the last couple of months, a few things have come up that I was interested in, and I had a vague plan for some combination of working and going to school for my masters.

And while I was feeling very blessed that things seemed to be dropping into my lap, I still didn't want to give up my dream job that I currently have. The past seven months have been the most fun and challenging of my professional life. I love all the different roles I have, and I really love this newsroom and the students I work with. I know for a fact there is no place like it.

For a few weeks, there has been chatter about me getting to stay for another year. It is absolutely what I hoped for, but I was trying not to get my hopes up.

On Monday morning, I got the official word that I do get to stay. (My boss and I sealed it with a high five.) I am thrilled and feel very blessed that this is how it worked out. 

I'm also relieved I don't have to move again this summer. I had been hoarding boxes just in case, but they went out with the recycling this morning. And I'm accepting visitors through August 2013!

Some stuff

I tried hard to be a good sport for Halloween. And I will say I went to a Halloween party and had fun. However, I was all geared up for trick-or-treaters since I actually live in a house, but I didn't have any trick-or-treaters. And I have to say I was disappointed, I thought that would be a redeeming part of my bitterness against Halloween. The students loved the candy on Tuesday though.

The red cups and peppermint mochas are back at Starbucks. My office is a block and a half from Starbucks. This is dangerous.

When I was starting school at Mizzou, I didn't want to be the redneck from Tennessee. It took me a semester or two to lose the accent, but I was more concerned about other things that screamed I'm from out of state. I remember being excited that my dad and I flew to freshman orientation because it meant that we rented a car with Missouri license plates. Clearly, an important thing... But I was reminded of this when I put Missouri plates on my car. I have to admit I wasn't as excited as I might have been as a freshman or sophomore in college. I think part of it was I had to take off the Virginia plates, which took a lot of effort to get two years ago. I'm not sure the Missouri process had any fewer obstacles; I just wasn't trying to get it done in the first week I moved. Anyway, I'm really a Missouri resident now.

There was a whole season and a half of My Boys before I started watching. I realize I'm probably the only one that watched this show or has even heard of it, but it used to be on TBS at midnight when I would get off work at the newspaper. The good news is I get to watch it on instant Netflix.

The hard part

On Friday, I was emailing with a friend about community. I made the comment that community is always changing, it's just obvious when you move to a new place to start over. But I promised, you find new community and settle into your place.

But I glossed over the hard part, and I was quickly reminded of it that night. There was an event at the big church in town for 20-somethings on Friday night. This is the first event like that I had heard about there, so I knew I needed to take advantage of it and go.

What I forgot about is that I would have to walk into a room of 25 people I didn't know and mingle. It felt like everybody knew each other, and there was an "in" crowd. I did meet a couple of people, but it was one of those moments where you feel lonely in a crowd of people. And all I wanted to do was go back to Virginia and enjoy a fun Friday night with my group of friends there.

But I remembered that in Virginia I had walked into similar situations. I ended up at a pool party where I knew just a few people and felt like an outsider. But that's where I met Megan. She got my number and started inviting me over to try her cakes or to have dinner with her and became a close friend.  

And one Sunday I was sitting by myself in Sunday School, and a girl named Katherine sat down beside me and ended up inviting me to her Bible study. She became one of my best friends, and that Bible study was my community there.

It was at that Bible study that I met Andrea who got my email address and became my social coordinator and another one of my best friends. I went to a dinner party at her house, and I had a lot of fun. I remember leaving her house and thinking, "I'm going to be OK here."

But it took walking into those hard situations to get to that point. It's easy to bury myself in work or sit on my couch on a Saturday night watching movies on Netflix. Putting myself out there and letting in new people is the hard part, but it's also the only way to create that new community.

But the good news is I've decided on a church. The people are really friendly, and I met a girl last week that invited me to her community group. I couldn't actually make it, but I got to have dinner with her and she invited me to her Halloween party. I went to the party on Saturday, and it was completely different from the Friday night party. I met people and enjoyed some great conversation. I left feeling like I'm on the right track to finding my community.

The six-week rule

When I went to school nine hours away from home, a weekend trip home was not feasible. But I was at a state school where a large majority of the students could make weekend trips home. And there were weekends when it felt like the dorm was empty, and I really struggled that first semester.

But since I didn't have a choice, I made the best of it and found people that did stay around on the weekends. I had to dig in and really make it my community. I found great friends and really loved my time in college.

As I've moved to new places since then, I've imposed a rule on myself to force myself to invest in a new place. For the first six weeks or so, I can't go home or leave town and escape. It forces me to find community and really be present in a new place.

But I also realize that I reach a point where I need to see familiar faces and have a conversation face-to-face with someone that already knows me.

In Georgia, a weekend trip home was easy, and in Virginia, my best friend was just a couple of hours away. And here, I have friends less than two hours away.

I had forgotten that I needed that refresher of seeing familiar people until I visited with some friends last weekend. After almost two months in a new place, I needed a real hug and a conversation deeper than the small talk when meeting new people.

Things are going well here, and this weekend I had a couple of things going on with new friends. I found myself less frustrated by the getting to know you stage after getting that weekend away. (Though I will confess I am tired of telling people I am not a student.) And there are two potential churches, so I'm feeling better on that front as well.

And this coming weekend is Homecoming, which is a HUGE deal around here. I'm looking forward to seeing friends I haven't seen in a long time, and enjoying the fun parts of Homecoming without having to do the work.

Is this normal?

I've either noticed some strange things or experienced random things, and I just had to share.

A rooster living in a park on campus. Yes, there's a rooster that lives in a park across the street from work. I've seen it once, and I've also seen professionals try to catch it with a net, pretty amusing actually. Apparently, there is a woman that feeds it every day as well. Obviously, a newspaper story is in the works.


To be greeted outside of church by a guy with an iPad to "check me into a class." I'm sure this is an efficient system, but it was yet another sign the church is huge. Of course, I was there for my women's study, which didn't count, so I didn't get to see what cool app he had for checking people in.

To watch TV while pumping gas. There were TVs at all of the pumps at this particular gas station. They were showing the NBC affiliate run by the journalism school, which is cool, but it still seemed odd.

To be asked if I'm on Facebook on a visitor card at church. Is it just me or is that a little creepy for a church or its staff to search for you on Facebook? It turns out this church actually ended up sending me snail mail this week.

People dressed as vikings in a park. I drove by this on my way home from work and thought maybe they were filming a Capital One commercial.

For a church service to completely stop for seven minutes while the children are dismissed. They had a countdown on the screen for when the service would start again. It kind of turned into social time, and I thought it disrupted the whole flow of the service, especially considering I don't have kids to take to a classroom.

To send out a Google form to my students and get half of them back printed out and filled out by hand. The whole point was that I didn't want to have to decipher their handwriting.

To get a gift certificate for a coffee shop in the mail from a church I visited. It's definitely appreciated, but is it necessary?

I forgot about this part

I have debated writing this post for quite a while, and I wrote it to process my own thoughts more than anything. But if you have any thoughts or suggestions on church shopping, I'd love to hear them!

When I graduated from college, I was looking for a church just like the one I attended here in college. I ended up driving 45 minutes to find a match, but after a year I realized it was hard to have community in a church 45 minutes away. And it turns out there was a great, small church right in front of me that took me in.

Then I moved and was told to go to one specific church by everyone, but after three weeks, I was so sick of always meeting different people during the peace greeting, I almost stopped going. But I ended up finding my best friends through that church and the ministries there. My circle of friends continued to grow, and that huge church felt a lot smaller when I left.

It's funny how the things you dislike the most become the things you miss the most. After six weeks of going to the church I attended in college, I would give anything for a peace greeting during the service. For weeks, I've walked in and out of the church without talking to anyone.

Now that I'm here and back at my old college church, I'm realizing that I expect different things from a church than I did when I was in college. I am depending on a church to meet people and find friends and some community here. The preaching at the church is even better than I remember. The Gospel is preached over and over, and while I had to readjust to the music, it is a worshipful experience. But in the six years I've been gone, the church has become a megachurch.

And I'm struggling to see how I'll find community in that environment. I was originally excited because I thought there was a young professionals Sunday School class, but it stopped meeting this summer. I've joined a women's study, but I grew even more concerned about the church when women who had been going there for two to three years were having a very similar experience of not talking to anyone on Sunday mornings.

So I'll be trying a new church this Sunday. As my mom told me the other day, I don't have to be monogamous with a church, so I may end up doing some mixing and matching. But I seemed to have blocked this part of the whole moving to a new city thing because it's much harder than I remember.

One funny thing about adjusting here: In my last few weeks in Virginia, I felt like I was always running into people I know -- at the grocery store, downtown, etc. At the time, I thought: I'm really going to miss that because it took a long time for that to be the case. What I did not consider is that in my new job I interact with dozens of students on a daily basis, and that I would start seeing those students around town. I ran into one at the grocery store recently, I ducked from another because I couldn't remember his name or whether he was a copy editor or reporter, and then had one student yell to me from several yards away. So, I guess that part happened quicker than expected.

Chaos, i.e. students arrive!

So last week was my brief chance to (1) get up to speed on how things work at the paper and (2) come up with a plan for the class I teach. This week students arrived, and I suddenly became an expert and a teacher.

Here's the best description I could come up with for how things went this week:

Imagine you work with several teams of people to complete a project/task/product. Now imagine that it's the first day of work for everyone on those teams. And then imagine that this repeats itself every day of the week for a week. Of course add to that the fact that it's only your second week on the job and you can start to imagine the chaos.

Basically, as soon as I had a handle on the Monday teams, it was Tuesday and there was an entirely new crew. It also feels like as soon as I managed one crisis, I was hit with another.

While there is something energizing about working with students, especially the ones who are over-eager, I also had to realize that they are flaky 21-year-olds who are working for you for free. Of course, they have no hesitation in canceling a shift at the last minute.

All week, I've watched my days fly by and even forgotten to stop and eat. I work until the paper is done on Tuesdays, which was 12:30 a.m. this week, and even though I don't think I slept much, I was excited to get up and teach a class and be in the newsroom all day on Wednesday. I consider all of these things to be proof that this is a job I'm passionate about and that there was something missing before.

I'm still figuring out how to factor in life stuff and even a social life (when I find some friends) with all of this but that will come once I get past the craziness of the first few weeks.

A house with character

I am now in my third rental. I've been really lucky with all the places I've lived. Each place has had some character. I never did the apartment complex thing, so my apartments and my current house have all been unique. But I think this house wins as the one with the most character, and I absolutely love it.

The house was built by my landlord's grandfather. He was a bricklayer, so the house is pretty much all brick -- inside and out. Some of the rooms have plaster over the brick, but I'm pretty sure all but a couple of the interior walls are actually brick. My landlord has been insistent on keeping it as it was, so there's wallpaper in the dining room that most people would have taken down years ago. And in "the brick room" there's a wooden built-in desk with shelves that she actually had put back in after it was taken out to replace the flooring.

The house also has "j-school karma" as my landlord said. Her grandmother was in PR and did freelance writing. She also collected Mark Twain newspapers and used them to cover the bathroom closet:

My landlord, who spent a lot of time at the house growing up, also attended journalism school at Mizzou.

Throughout the house, there are little things you wouldn't find in a modern house, including a built-in scale in the bathroom.

While a part of me thinks of all the things I would do to change the house if I owned it, I actually love the character that comes with it. And I understand why my landlord wants to preserve the history of the house. It's a privilege to get to live in it for a little while. More pictures of the house are on Facebook.

Job update

I started work this week, and for now the excitement of being back in an active, loud newsroom that is familiar is outweighing the fears and anxiety over teaching a class. I've been able to jump in and actually feel productive in workflow on the first two days. Actually getting to post stories and play with the layouts isn't a lot, but I can at least point to something I did.

I honestly had no idea what this job would look like on a day-to-day basis, so it's been great to have a better idea of what the next year is going to look like. The exciting news is that I'm working day shifts with the exception of Tuesday nights (which was also my late shift at the old job).

On the dayside shift, I oversee the interactive copy desk for the website of a city newspaper. While I do some of the actual work, a lot of it is overseeing students, answering questions and challenging the students to think about how our content is presented and distributed.

When I work the late shift, I will be spending some time with the print product — coaching copy editors and helping designers — while also making sure the website is ready for the morning.

I also will teach a class on news design. I've been given a ton of resources, but I'm having to dig back to several years ago when I first learned design. It's been a few years since I actually did design work, so I'm actually going to design the front page of the paper one night this week just to remind myself of what's required.

I also get to have an office day to work on class stuff and catch up on things without being constantly interrupted. Also, for the first time in my professional career, I have an office, though I've only spent about 30 minutes total in it for the first two days.

I'm only two days in, and I haven't had to face the classroom yet, but I am so excited to be back in this environment. This week there are a bunch of graduate students in the newsroom getting their feet wet as reporters. The attitude of the newsroom here is different than probably any other newsroom in the country. These students are hungry to write and report and get their clips — not for pay but for a grade. I'm sure the complaining will come as the semester wears on, but it's fun to see people excited about journalism and looking to do more than just slide by. It's definitely a glass half-full place.

There have been so many things so far that really affirmed this job and the reasons God had me wait for it. There are still hard things to come in this transition, but things are off to a really great start.

Things I didn't expect (moving edition)

Well, I've made it to Missouri and actually feel settled in my new house. I'm not sure how regularly I'll be blogging once work starts but I have a few posts about the move in mind.

I think this is true for any move, but as much as I planned and tried to be prepared and organized, the actual move didn't match any of the scenarios I was expecting. In fact, there were a lot of things I didn't expect -- both good and bad. Here's my list because I think it's a good summary of the move, and in the end the good things definitely outweighed the bad.

Things I didn't expect:

• To move out of my apartment in the middle of the night. The movers showed up at 10 p.m. and finished at 12:30 a.m. after waking up my neighbors. But the movers did show up after I spent a lot of time worrying that they wouldn't show at all.
• To get to Missouri at 2:30 a.m. after a 15-hour drive because we had to beat the movers.
• For the 15-hour drive to fly by as I chatted with my mom and enjoyed the scenery.
• For all of my stuff to weigh 5,000 pounds, considering all estimates were between 3,000 pounds and 4,000 pounds.
• To not have a bank branch within a two-hour drive. Lots of drama about this, which will ultimately require me to drive to Kansas to get money back on a cashier's check.
• For it to be so easy to get a money order from the post office and to find a post office that stays open until 7 p.m.
• For my movers to actually show up with my stuff on the first day of the delivery window. I had visions of waiting several days to get my stuff, but it was all moved in 14 hours after I arrived.
• For it to be 75 degrees in August when the movers unloaded my stuff.
• To get so lucky for the second time of renting a place sight unseen. My house is perfect!
• To have to get a new social security card and for it to take less than 15 minutes to do it.
• To meet a potential friend on my first night in town.
• To have to break into my own house on my second night. Lesson learned and now all windows are either locked or nailed shut so no one else can break in.

Things I'll miss

Most of all I'm going to miss my friends and the community I had here. But here's some other things I'll miss from my life here:

• Walking to work (and to pretty much anything else I need)
• The Downtown Mall
• Restaurants, particularly my lunch favorites: Eppie's, The Country Store (best salad bar)
• My apartment and neighborhood
• My church (I think I'll still be downloading sermons.)
• The mountains
• Convenience to my best friend from high school and my sister
• My co-op and the farmer's market
• The never-ending list of things to do and events in town
• Court Square (Just love this little part of downtown I walked through everyday.)
• Fall (yes, there will be a fall in Missouri but not nearly as beautiful as it is here)
• Monticello trail (and walking it with friends)

There's probably much more I'll add to this list once I've actually moved.

Since graduating from high school, I've lived in six cities for varying lengths of time, and I have to say that this one wins as my favorite so far. Before I moved here, I knew nothing about the city and actually thought I wanted something bigger, but I quickly discovered this city was exactly what I wanted, and it makes me think college towns are the best places to live. I definitely hope that somehow I end up back here, but it's fun to experience new cities and, hopefully, re-experience a city I've already lived in.

OK, back to the boxes!

Heart friends

The day I got the call about the job in Missouri, Jon Acuff wrote this Serious Wednesday post. I urge to read the whole post, but the gist of it is that he wrote about the importance of relationships and described what he called heart friends. One excerpt:


"Friendships are ineffective. The ROI on relationship is pretty horrible. They can take years to develop. They might lead nowhere. They will definitely hurt you at some point. And you couldn’t quantify them if you tried. But Christ sought them out. Christ knew what it meant to be known."

It was interesting to read this on the day that I got the news about the job. While I am excited about what's in store for me in Missouri, I am really sad to leave this place where I have found such great friendships.

When I left Georgia two years ago, I was running. I didn't admit it at the time, but I was running and never looked back. I did know some great people there, but I wasn't invested and I didn't have anything keeping me there. Thankfully, God gave me a direction in that running and blessed me with two years in this place.

I have friends here that really know me, friends that I've invested in and who have invested in me, friends I've opened up to and lived life with. And when I shared my news with them, they were happy for me. Yes, we are all sad, but they still wanted what was right for me and are cheering for my success in this new adventure.

I know our friendships don't end when I drive out of town and that we will stay connected, but this is the hard part of this transient life I lead. I used to think that loneliness was part of the package as a twenty-something, single woman and that finding friends in that same place in life when you aren't in college was impossible. But these friends have proved me wrong. And it gives me hope that if I'm willing to dig in and be open, God has some more friends He wants me to meet in Missouri. But it still scares me.

This is also a hard time to walk away from the relationships I have here. I have a friend going through something really tough right now, and it's going to be hard not to be here. But it does put things in perspective. There are bigger things than a new city and a new job, and there are friendships that transcend all of it.

This time I'm not running, and I will look back. I'll even be back — at the very least — to visit. This is not a week of good-bye but of "see you later."

The details are covered

As if waiting on a job isn't stressful enough, there is the part where I have to move halfway across the country. As I've gone through this process I kept feeling like there were points where God was saying, "I've got it covered."

I live in a pretty amazing apartment, minus the raccoon drama, and the apartment is in a house that has five other apartments. There has only been one other apartment that I've really wanted here. It has a huge kitchen and a large back deck. So I had been waiting for the girl that lived there to get engaged/married (she was dating someone). She ended up getting married, and back in the spring after I had applied for the first job at MU, I came home and she was moving out.

Of course, my mind started going a million miles a minute, and I was already stressing about what if I move upstairs and then have to move again but what if I don't go to Missouri and miss out on the kitchen up there and on and on. After 15 minutes of this, I knew I had to find out what was going on. I emailed my landlord, and after apologizing for not offering me the apartment, she told me that she already had someone to move in.

I felt like God just said: "Don't stress, I've already taken away the decision for you." And so I was saved sleepless nights and moving twice all in about 20 minutes.

But now of course, I needed somewhere to live in Missouri. I was so lucky finding this apartment sight unseen in a city I didn't know at the time, I just wasn't sure it would work out again. And I've had the best landlord, and even she was excited for me when I got the job. For weeks I had been checking craigslist multiple times a day and not coming up with the location I wanted.

On Monday I finally found a place that met most of my criteria, but I was jumping through hoops with a rental management company that weren't easy to jump through long distance. And then on Wednesday I found the perfect house, in the best location with a wonderful landlord included. I'm holding off on showing pictures of the inside until I have my stuff in there (rather than the chaos of old tenants in the process of moving out). But here's the outside:

The current tenants didn't give notice of moving out until July 11. I'm not positive when the ad was put in the newspaper, but the ad itself was vague and I first came across it on Tuesday. So if this process had gone any faster, I would have never found it and settled for something I wasn't quite happy with. And guess what it has? A DISHWASHER! Not sure if I'm more excited about that or my very own washer and dryer included in the house.

God had all the details worked out, and He managed to save me some stress along the way.

The back story and God's timing

I wanted to share a bit about the way God has prepared me for and worked out the details of my new job and move back to Missouri.

For about a year, I've struggled with some discontentment in my current situation. There was nothing terrible, but I knew I wasn't thriving in my work and didn't have the passion and interest I used to have. I started to apply for some positions in the area but never seemed to get anywhere.

While I've always been big on job security and having benefits and financial security, this spring I stepped outside of the box and considered something pretty risky. I fought hard for a role I thought was made for me and was willing to accept the risk involved. But I ended up really disappointed.

I found some hope in that disappointment and was reminded that if I thought this particular thing was perfect, then whatever God has for me is even better.

At that point I was determined to stay in my current city. This place has become home, and I have such great friends and community here. But when I was challenged on my insistence on staying, I had to question my motives. After two years of learning about idols, I still missed a very obvious one in my life. I realized I had made my comfort in this city an idol. I wanted to stay here more than I wanted God's plan for me. My prayers always had a "but," i.e. please change this situation but let me stay here.

With that conviction, I opened myself up to looking beyond opportunities in this city. And I found what was even more perfect than the position I fought so hard for. I found a posting for a one-year position at my alma mater working with students in the journalism school and at the city newspaper there. Even six months before, I would never have considered a temporary position like this, but after the experience of preparing to accept some risk with a previous opportunity, the one-year term actually turned out to be part of the appeal of the job.

There was a long process after I found this position and a lot of waiting, even a rejection involved. But God's timing is perfect and He used that time to mold it into the right job for me and prepare me for the possibility of moving.

More to come on this.