Church Update and Reality Check

So since I had Monday off, I was able to go to church twice on Sunday. It seems to me that my church is doing well. My dad told me that almost 35% of the people at church had never had any other pastor other than the pastor at my church. This is very encouraging because it means that about 1/3 of the members of our church are new Christians or have just recently started coming to our church. This is extremely exciting. Also my church is very close to finally finding a permanent Youth Pastor to replace the one that left shortly after the split. This is just another sign that my church is slowly recovering from what happened almost two years ago. Even though there all of these wonderful things going on, there is still a lot of really hard feelings between the people that stayed and the people that left. I continue to hear stories of people still being very unhappy with several of the people that left. Also it continues to be quite weird for me to return to my church just because so much has changed and so many people have left. I have to just keep reminding myself that it is never going to be the same at the church I grew up in, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. I obviously still have some healing to do from what happened, but seeing these different things has been so encouraging.

The next part of this post is the Reality Check part. There is a boy that is my age who has been going to my church for 5 or 6 years and has been struggling with cancer the whole time. I found out this weekend that he was extremely close to death and was in hospice care in his home. This reminds me how short life is. He is only 21 years old and is dying of cancer. It is so sad, but he has been inspiring to me and so many other people because his faith in Jesus Christ. He has definitely showed people around him how to trust in Christ and His plan even when it is so hard to do so.