A Banquet, A Pastor's Assistant & A Printing Company

These first few posts are very me-centric. I'm not going to be doing that all the time, just to establish and get started. Like I said, I want to document where I've been and that's step one. When we moved to Maryland, Marc and I wanted to get established in a church and really be a part of it. We sucked at doing that in college, we picked the wrong church, got shut down and then just quit trying. We decided in pre-marital counseling that it was really important to our marriage that we establish a strong relationship with a local group of Bible believing people. I'm not going to lie, we took our sweet time picking a church, we'd been burned too many times in the past so we were hesitant and we wanted to make sure we were getting it right. It's amazing how God even uses our disobedience to work for his plan, because the timing worked out really perfectly for my attempt at self-employment.

We finally settled on The Church at Severn Run in Severn, MD around Christmas 2011. We started going regularly, we sat alone, but we went. One day this guy was wearing an LSU shirt, I made a victory hand gesture of some sort, fast-forward and we are suddenly really plugged into the Young Married Professionals Small Group thanks to him & his wife. Now this group does a lot for Severn Run, which we didn't know getting into it, but I'm glad they do. Two of our leaders had been asked to coordinate this capital campaign banquet and they were trying to figure out invitations and RSVPs and they remembered that I was a designer trying to get started. I like to think of this moment as my big break. They introduced me to Brenda Bailey who is the assistant to the Pastor at Severn Run, and she quickly learned that I was pretty ok at this design stuff. She has been one of my biggest "sales people" ever since February 2012 and I will always be aware of that.

In April 2012, something CRAZY happened – I got a job interview! I had my own little thing petering along, but I was still applying to jobs here and there. I decided that I needed to reprint my portfolio for this job and that was a problem because my interview was the next business day after a holiday. This lead to a frantic search for a printing venue that could do a little better than Kinkos, and I remembered a small company Brenda had mentioned called DigitalWorx. For some reason, they were the last ones I called, but I finally did. After viewing my portfolio, and receiving a raving review from Brenda, DigitalWorx asked me to partner with them as a pre-press designer and they are honestly one of the biggest blessings to my career.

That's a lot of backstory, I know, here's my confession y'all. I was not seeking God through any of this ever, yet he was still setting up these steps for me to take. He was opening windows and I was blindly crawling through them. Remember how I said Marc and I really just stopped trying at the church thing in college, well that can apply to pretty much everything in our relationships with Christ. We weren't seeking, we weren't trying, we just weren't. It's a miracle to me that he still was seeking after me when I was blatantly not seeking him.

Here's my take away from these totally unplanned, yet pivotal events:

• Don't stop seeking God. How much more peace and assurance would I have had if I was taking the time to seek out where God was taking me?
• Community is so important. All of these events were based on people, community. Each person involved in this part of the story has taught me to value myself and my talents and that has been monumental in my story today.

If you are starting to get tired of hearing about how God's hand in my life has led me to where I am today, well it's just too bad. I can't deny his provision in my story and I'm grateful for it and humbled by it each time I reflect. 2 Corinthians 12:9 is real in my life, "But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me."

In my next post I want to reflect on how my confidence was slowly restored through my relationship with these new people, and we will start talking about some of my early projects (that I'm proud of!).