The Art of Encouragement
We arrived in Los Angeles on July 27th, 2001. My wife had been accepted to UCLA’s dental school, and we were starting an entirely new chapter in our lives. With two kids, one was just turning seven and the other just eighteen- months-old, it was a challenge, to say the least. Fortunately, the house we had purchased in Orcutt, a town on the Central Coast of California, sold for a lot more than we had paid for it. The money helped us move to L.A., closing the financial gap between when I could get my business up and running.
I had resigned my credentials as a pastor temporarily so I could raise my kids and work. But I volunteered as much as I could at every church we attended. I developed some good relationships, including the one with the senior pastor of Pacific Christian Center in Santa Maria, Rick Bloom.
It was through Rick that I had decided to renew my credentials in ministry before I went down to Los Angeles. We knew no one in L.A. when we moved there. We truly were rebooting in a new area, city, and culture. We needed to get settled, start developing relational connections, and find a church!
When our oldest started school in September at Redeemer Baptist School, we were invited to an open house. One of her new friends was a little girl in that school whose dad was a pastor of a local church in Culver City. We met the pastor and his wife at the open house.
That night when Tania and I got back to the apartment and settled the kids in bed, we both looked at each other and said almost simultaneously that this little church was the one we would begin attending—sight unseen. That has never happened to us before or since.
We did just that. The church was meeting at a school. We attended the first service there and discovered they were at the end of a building-fund campaign so they could rent their own space in Culver City, which was already in the works.