The Website (not me) Got a Facelift, The Church is Moving {…and apparently, God is not finished…}

There is a particular kind of moment, you’ve had them, I’ve had them, where you look around at your life and think: huh. Something is shedding.

Not falling apart. Not dying. Not a state of “transition” (what an over-used concept!)

Shedding.

Like the whole thing has quietly outgrown its container while you weren’t paying attention,and now it has become a little root-bound, and the only honest response is to let containers go and grow into whatever comes next.

That’s been my spring.

I’ll start with the small thing, because sometimes the small thing is actually the thing that tells you what the big thing means:

I’ve been refreshing my website.

website refreshes need new head shots…

Now, I know. Website updates rank somewhere between “reorganizing the junk drawer” and “watching paint dry” on the excitement scale. Nobody wakes up at 3:33 a.m. with a vision from the Lord about their footer, and all the ways it can be made more sexy.

And yet, I did.

I’ve been building this little corner of the internet for over 16 years (and internet years are like dog years), adding to it, patching it, letting it accumulate like a studio table accumulates notan sketches and half finished paintings.

Functional. Loved. A little chaotic. Deeply mine.

But lately I’d look at this site, and feel what I can only describe as creative friction.

Nothing broken. Just a little strained. And suddenly, you understand the good good problem: What used to be, has been outgrown.

So I’ve been doing the work. (So. Much. Work.) New hero image. Better flow. Actual buttons that take you somewhere useful. A blog preview on the landing page, so you can find the writing without having to go on virtual safari for it.

Small things. Surface things.

Except, they aren’t surface at all, are they?

Because the reason I needed a refresh is that the work has grown. More books. More art, more commissions. More workshops and more speaking. More of you, women in the middle, women in the fourth quarter, women who are making anyway and showing up anyway and discovering, late and gloriously, that beauty really is a practice and not something you either can or cannot afford, or something you either have or don’t.

This container got too small for what God keeps putting in it.

Which brings me to the thing that is not small at all. (Brace yourself. There is no other segue.)

Harvest Church, our church, the church we have loved and served and sometimes wept over and always, always come back to…

…is selling our building.

Thirty years, that building has held us.

Thirty years of Sunday mornings and weddings and funerals and worship sets and sermons and potlucks and prayer meetings and children who grew up beneath that roof, now bringing their own children back through those same doors.

Thirty years.

And we are selling it.

Because we are growing.

Someone please hold me. Because I love this little building. And I am not one bit ashamed to say so, because that is one of the things the Lord loves best about me: I “get it”.

For thirty years, I took what 99% of church leaders would consider a liability (a small building) and I managed to turn it into an asset. Because I understand the human soul’s need for continuity and beauty and meaning.

But it is time to let this place be loved well by the next church. I want you to sit with that for a second, because though YES, I have loved this little house, I also think we, the people of God, humans in general, are prone to confusing the container with the content.

We love the building because the building held the thing we love. And somewhere along the way, without meaning to, we can sometimes start protecting the container as if the container IS the thing.

(See? I can easily hold two seemingly opposing perspectives at the same time, letting both be true. And actually, the Lord likes that about me. Because that is where His wisdom often lives, is in the paradox. “I love this building so, so much. The church is not the building.”)

It isn’t. The container isn’t the thing.

The thing is the people. The thing is the presence of God. The thing is what happens when broken, beautiful, ordinary people show up week after week, bathed in all that natural light from our many windows, and they let Jesus do what only Jesus can do, which is take the most unpromising raw material imaginable and make something that carries glory.

That glory doesn’t live in a building.

That glory fills up a building and then spills out the door looking for a bigger one. One that may or may not have windows (God help me, on that one. No one will ever know the sacrifice it will be for this artist, to move into a metal box with no windows in its sanctuary…)

There is a Hebrew word I love: hapach. It means to turn. To overturn. To transform one thing into another. It’s the word for what God does with sorrow when He decides it’s time for something else entirely. He alchemizes it. Turns it, the way a potter turns clay, into something new.

A website refresh is a small hapach.

A church outgrowing its thirty-year home is a large hapach.

But they are the same movement, really. The same God, working the same way, pressing on the thing until it yields, until it stretches, until it becomes the next version of itself.

Not unrecognizable. Not starting over. Just… more.

More room. More reach. More of what was always in there, finally given space to breathe.

I don’t know where Harvest Church lands next. I don’t know what the new building looks like or whether it will have natural light (Lord, help me Jesus…). I do not know what street it’s on or how many Sunday mornings will happen before we move in there, and after that how many Sunday mornings before it too feels like home.

I have no idea how many Sunday mornings will transpire before I am able to take the new container and, with my new eyes, love that place into a contagious state of grace.

But I know I will. Because that’s one of the gifts of growing older. You know how to fall in love, over and over again.

I also know this: the same God who filled the first room will fill the next one.

I know that the women of Harvest Church, and the women who read this blog, and the women in the middle of their own shedding seasons right now, are not in decline.

You are not shrinking.

You are outgrowing your container.

And that, my friend, is not a problem to be managed.

That’s a promise being kept.

Welcome to the refreshed site. Come on in — I’ve made room.

(Tell me: what container have you outgrown lately? I’d love to hear about it.)