Shower the People You Love With Love

A while back Becca and I were faced with the decision of where to live after marriage. The Lord had already blessed me with work in Jersey, so we at least had a home base of Warren County, New Jersey from which to fan out and begin our search. It quickly boiled down to a choice between western Jersey or eastern Pennsylvania.

Finances are a big deal to most any newly-wed couple. As far as I can tell, gas is the only thing more costly on the western side of the Delaware River. Car insurance, rent, houses, and property taxes are just a few of the cost of living items that make living in Pennsylvania seem so appealing. If Financial Impact was the item on our decision matrix that carried the highest weighting factor, I can say with certainty that Becca and I would have a lease contract, if not mortgage, for a place in PA.

But it's not just a dollars-and-cents decision. We both have strong convictions that money should not be a deterent to obtaining what we believe to be the worthy pursuits in life. Through prayer and wise council, we are trying to prepare ourselves now, early in our marriage-to-be, to establish habits that we hope will free us of letting money be a controlling force in our decisions in our life. With that said, the intangible reasons to stay in New Jersey were more persuasive than that which could be deposited and withdrawn.

After much consideration, the item with the highest weighting factor became our conviction that we needed to be able to live close enough to be active members in a body of believers, a local church. Through various means and living examples (both bad and good), we agreed that we would not settle for being "Sunday members" of a congregation--essentially commuting to church for Lord's Day worship and not much else during the week. We both wanted to at least present ourselves with the possibility of plugging into the weekly life of the church, if not even going to far as to engage in church ministry. We limited ourselves to a twenty-minute radius about any known reformed congregation in PA or NJ in which to settle, so this did not of necessity mean we decided to stay near the Hackettstown OPC. It certainly did, however, made it harder to leave.

There were a few reasons we chose to stay at Hackettstown OPC. The first was that we were obviously already there. Becca had been received as a communicant member this summer, and I am going on 23 years here. There are members who prayed for me on my date of birth, or changed my diapers in the nursery, or babysat me as a toddler. In some ways I have more of an affection for my "adopted grandparents" here than I do my own blood relations.

It has been difficult in ways for Becca to come into "my world" at church, with literally every member knowing so much about me. She has had to fight frustrations of feeling more like "Scott's fiance" than "Rebecca Roszel, new member." But aside from this and the subtle tendency to blur the line between familiarity and indifference, we could not be in a more caring, supportive environment to start out.

And this could not have been made more evident than it was this Saturday when Becca was thrown a surprise bridal shower. Nearly 30 women of the church came out on a cold and otherwise dismal Saturday afternoon to literally shower my future wife with gifts, food, recipes, furnishings, appliances, advice, love, joy, and cake. Another three sent a gift and their regrets at not being able to attend; two more brought theirs to church the next day.

We came away with a haul that required a Rav4 and the trunk of my parent's car to bring back to our apartment. Becca came away with an overwhelming sense of the outpouring of love that is so easily stirred up from the women of Hackettstown OPC. We both came away with gratitude and praise to the Lord who had given us such a clear and immediate sign that it was indeed a good decision to remain a part of our local church.