“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.  Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received money, but now you have received mercy.” – 1 Peter 2:9-10

Yes.  We are the chosen people.  By being the chosen people, we are responsible to keep each other accountable and encourage one another as we walk closer to our Abba Father.  After I relocated to New Haven, MO for my training, I checked out different church communities around here.  I don’t know if I mentioned this on my last post on this blog, but in a town that just has over 2,000 people, there are 11 churches here with all different denominations.  However, after checking out churches here and there, I ended up deciding going to this non-denominational church called Damascus Road at Hermann, MO, which is about 20 minutes away from where I live.

I got plugged into this church community by my co-worker Patty.  She and I worked together for couple of days beginning of the month, and she has been incredibly friendly with me.  For over the course of that couple days, even if we did not know one another well, we ended up deeply sharing about our lives.  Of course, the conversation soon enough turned into me telling her how I’m looking for a community to depend on during my stay here.  Then, she told me about how she goes to a non-denominational church as well and she encouraged me to come out one one of the Sundays, which I ended up going about couple weeks later.

The way that Damascus Road started was with just a small group of people who gathered to worship God. After many years later, they decided to purchase this old middle school building to use that building as a church.  However, as the time went along further, they were having vandalism problem because the local teenagers would often break into the building to skateboard in the gym.  After many incidents, the pastor put up a note at the entrance saying, “if anyone wants to skateboard here, call me at this number and I’ll kindly open the door and let you use the gym”.  Since that point on, teenagers started coming over and their parents started coming over, and they were ultimately able to build a bigger church community.

The church itself is actually a lot smaller than my church community back at home, HMCC.  However, people are more diverse as far as age and where they are from.  Since the church is on the smaller side, it’s much easier to share my struggles with people.  I think God is really teaching me something here.  He is teaching me how to be more open with people.  Being this much of a private person, He has definitely given me the courage to be more vulnerable with people.  In fact, two Sundays ago, we had a corporate prayer time at the end of the service, and that was one of the most powerful prayers that I’ve had in a long time.

When I first arrived here in New Haven, one of my major fears was not being able to find a community, thus getting further away from God.  Yet, God has proven me wrong one more time.  Having community to depend on is good; however, before depending on the community, depending fully on God comes first.  I can depend on so many things, but if I don’t depend on God and let Him be the center of my life, everything that I depend on is fake.

Wow…time flies so fast.  I still feel like I’m getting used to this whole thing about living and having a life out in the country, but I’m already wrapping my third week here, heading onto my fourth.  Many things happened.  I started doing a lot of hands-on work.  Now, I always had a dream of having my future husband to be a blue collar man, but I feel like I’m becoming this blue collar person, instead of him, whomever he might be.  My day these days consists of tearing things down and putting stuff back together.  I really do feel like I’m learning a lot and I’m thankful for that.  The only concerns that I have is having my hands full of scratches and wounds, which is currently happening as I speak.

Work is really demanding.  I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I really miss my manager back in Michigan at the headquarters.  The manager that I have here in the New Haven office acts like a “frat boy” and I feel like he’s the biggest bully around here.  It’s like a big old boy’s club.  He was making fun of me the moment that we’ve met saying that I’m the first lady rotating engineer who came down here.  Meanwhile, he always complains about people not taking him seriously, but my thoughts are if you want somebody to take you seriously, you need to be serious with that person too, instead of joking around all the time.  I still have my 11 to 12 hour days pretty much every day.  After I physically started tearing things down and putting stuff together, I’ve gotten more physically tired every day.  But when I think about this in another perspective, I guess it’s a good thing because there aren’t that many things to do to socialize with people, so keeping myself busy has been definitely helpful in preventing loneliness.

On the other hand, I’ve been also having some fun.  Just this past weekend, my coworker Judy invited me to her farm.  When she first mentioned to me that she lives in the farm and when she officially invited me out, I kind of freaked out a bit because I’ve never been in the farm before and I told her that I’ve never lived in a place where there is less than 100,000 people living.  She told me it will be really fun and that she had planned a really exciting day for me.  So after giving a little bit of a thought, I decided to accept her invitation.

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, then you probably realized that I had so much fun.  I learned how to ride the 4-wheeler and the tractor.  Along with that, I rode in in combine with her husband Steve, while he harvested the soy beans that they’ve planted couple of months ago.  It was a really great experience and I’ve grown to have a more appreciation in farming.  After that, I had some really good home grown beef because Judy has cows, along with some deer sausage.  I’ve never had the deer before, but it was really good.  Seasoned perfectly, and it tastes exactly like a beef jerky.  To wrap up the day, we went to the neighborhood party and enjoyed the food and the music that the local farm boy band was playing.

So far, life out here in New Haven is not as bad as I originally expected.  When I first heard that my company is sending me out here out of nowhere, I got really scared because I was afraid of not having anybody to depend on and not having anybody to hang out.  I remember starting from a week before my training started, I asked God and whined to Him how much I did not want to go.  I said, “Father, you were the one who wanted me to dedicate my life here in Michigan for the next two years.  Why do you put me into this situation all of a sudden?”  But despite my complaints and my beliefs, God has proven me wrong once again.  He still surrounded me with people whom I can trust, and He enabled me to meet these people whom to have good life-long memories with.  I still really miss being in Ann Arbor, but I know that when this training is over, I’ll be missing this little town and the people that I’ve met.  I feel very fortunate.  There are so much to learn from here.  The people, town, atmosphere, and most importantly being faithful to God even if I don’t have the community that I used to have with me.

Prayer Requests:

1. Being 100% faithful to God and trusting in His vision
2. Relationship with my manager for the time being here in New Haven
3. Building everlasting relationship with people here
4. Finding community that I can depend on during training here in New Haven (will blog about this more later)

It has been exactly more than a month since my single adult life started.  In the beginning, things were very hectic.  I had 11 to 12 hour days to catch up on everything up to speed, especially for the program that I’ve been working on.  Other than that, I also had to attend hours and hours of training to get myself adjust to my company’s policies, learning different vocabulary, and figuring out who’s who and who’s doing what.

For this past month of September, I’ve been definitely humbled a lot.  I realized that I’m not the best nor the smartest person a live.  Every day I wish that my brain capacity was little bigger.  There were days that I’ve been asking God why you put me into these types of situation because the job that I have as a product engineer in the automotive industry is totally different from what I used to do as  materials science major coming out from my undergraduate years.  However, I prayed asking God to provide for me and He answered, so I try my best not to complain about it.

Commuting has been another issue.  I travel a lot.  I started to have two different desks at two different office locations, one in Auburn Hills, MI and the other in Warren, MI.  Getting up at 5:30 in the morning to commute has been really hard and especially whenever I have to go to my office in Auburn Hills, the 1-hour commute has been really tough both physically and mentally.  There were some days that I go to work and completely don’t know how I ended up being there safe and sound.  Some days I had to travel to both of those office locations on the same day.  Wow…I thought…this really blows.

However, in the mist of all my struggles, God has been definitely working in my life as well as really protecting my heart even at work.  My mentor/senior engineer has been really nice and helpful to me.  Unlike other engineers who just seem like really busy and have no interest in teaching and training the new hired people, my mentor has been physically taking his time from his program to help me catching things up to speed…now this is really rare.  Also, people at work are generally nice and flexible.  Having these wonderful people as my colleagues really help and enable me to work with them well and be able to demonstrate Christ-centered life.

Now, I’m in New Haven, MO for my 11-week training.  The work has definitely gotten more difficult and complicated.  I still have my 11 and 12-hour days and whenever I go home, I feel exhausted.  I used to be so attached to my cell phone and my laptop, but these days after work, I do not want to touch these.  I know it will be a demanding time for me with all these things going on with my program and training but I know God is here with me and He will always be.  So…what is life going to be like here in New Haven?