The Million Dollar Email Question

Wow! What a week and this is only Saturday! Last night Megan had a sleepover. We had company over as well (I love me some Tuckers), so the girls were in my bedroom playing Rockband. Several hours later, they are asleep on my bed and I didn't have the heart to wake them. So Jeff and I slept in the teen room. I couldn't help but think about my daughter's perceptions of this world as I looked around the 40 gazillion posters on her walls, awards, make-up and smelled the multi-perfumed smelly pillows I was laying on. She is at that very fragile age 13 going on 30. Raising kids in 2008 are not for the fearful or the weary! It takes investing every day something good, right, substantial, loving into their lives. Today (they are still asleep on my bed as I type) we are going to terrorize the shopping community and then off to a movie. Tomorrow is Easter and loads of family and food. I love to cook. So this will be a fun day! We have been invited to four different churches tomorrow. My friend is singing the Easter special at one so that may be our choice as I love to hear her sing. My daughter is leary of any of them. So for a moment I will get vulnerable and answer the question I receive the most by email. Why not our own church? It is so funny that you can dedicate YEARS into a place and not attend for weeks....almost two months and not hear a single word from anyone on staff except for a recorded message made for the entire church. It doesn't make me as sad for my husband and I even though my husband finally found the courage to surrender and do so much only to be forgotten or worse abandoned but I have a teenager who hasn't heard a word from any Sunday School Teacher or leader only friends. I know I know I can hear the critics especially one staff member who loves to blog about us. He would say...."You left and didn't say a word." So if you read that....know that is a lie. We met, we emailed, we talked to all the right people....so why the bitterness? Oh yes at first bitterness but now just sadness. There is a church in our community called Lifechurch in Cordova...I LIVE IN TIPTON COUNTY.... do you know they have contacted my family more than my own church and we are strangers. Just a "zip code" to reach for the future of their church. Their mailings are relevant, intriguing and unique. It makes you want to attend tomorrow! Now back to my ...sadness. Sadness for a baby girl who when she loves she loves BIG! Her favorite youth leader of all time is now starting a church in Georgia. Do you know at the height of all the scandal at our own church, he never wavered from investing in my daughter. Even when the church itself was hurting him, he never wavered from investing in my daughter. Still to this day, hundreds of miles away he invests in my daughter's life with an email or a comment. And yet her local leader can't? She finally allowed herself to get over losing her favorite leader and love again just to be forgotten. Now don't get me wrong there have been friends who have kept up with us and loved on us. They know who they are. Other "friends" have just kept up with us...and others have left. That is o.k. It really is. I just don't get how you sit around a table and discuss how can we reach a community, grow our church, therefore the tithes will go up, why don't they trust us???, if you can't even love on your own family. "I love my church because....they invest in my family, they love us through even the rough spots..they remember your children...NO!!! we want your tithes and to keep your opinions to yourself... especially if you know things that others don't....you have a problem or an opinion that differs and we want you gone...go away....you are like a pesky mosquito that needs to go away" That is the SIGN I want in my yard....(o.k. maybe a little bitterness remains). So I will search for what is right, good, not perfect, relevant, real and substantial if for no other reason than my baby girl. My answers come in the strangest place, so I will end my "rant" (another word the staffer will call this) by saying this...yesterday I had a heart to heart with my Meg. She has a "posse" that I love...they are always at my house. I had noticed one particular friend has not been hanging around the group. This worried me greatly. See someone was missing! Someone I loved and cared about was not there. What is up? Do I need to call her Mom..... Megan, in the most intelligence voice said, parents....divorce....crap.....hurt...pain...isolation. Her friends had not given up on her, they just had to help her in a different way. As a matter of fact, she was kind of taken back that I would even suggest she would give up on her friend. She said and I quote..."That is something adults do."