Happy 1st Birthday, Kaleo!!!

Tomorrow we will celebrate the first birthday of Kaleo!!! Just like with a child, it is so hard to believe a year has passed. When I think back over the year to the first service last January, I am in awe of how God has carried us through so much and through so many different emotions. It has been crazy. We were in a meeting yesterday with our management team, three pastors from partner churches, and Brent was talking about how there were times that we wanted to quit. It was so hard. (I'm using the past tense loosely. Certainly, I do not think the hard is over.) There have been numerous lessons in perseverance - really the same lesson, just over and over. In the midst of it all, of course, we saw great things, but as I blogged before it is so often easy to get bogged down with the not so great things, and to forget. The last two weeks have been very encouraging, and I am so excited to go and celebrate our one year anniversary tomorrow. We will be baptizing three people, which is wonderful. After service, we are heading to a park for a picnic. The weather is supposed to be a beautiful 71 degrees. It's January, and while I live in California, it's Bakersfield, and we do have cold temperatures. It is not supposed to be this warm in January. I think it is a nice little birthday present from God!!!

I need to blog more often about the great blessings, but I have been tired and lacking time since I started my job, but I did want to post something about tomorrow. I continue to hold onto the verses in Romans 5:1-5. This has been such an encouragement to me from shortly after we began our church planting journey. There are so many things in these verses, but the thing I have to remember and to focus on is in verse 2 ". . . and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God." It is easy for my joy and my hope to rest in the responses of the people around me. My hope should rest only in God.

So, as we move into year two, I pray that we will have joy that can only come from the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. And that his joy will be evident to those around us, so much so that they want to know why. Brent says that sometimes he feels that all we are doing is being faithful. We go through periods of time when we do not see a lot of fruit, and it can get us down, but our job is to be faithful to what God has called us. I pray we will continue to be faithful and that joy would be seen in that faithfulness.