Opening Doors

Okay, if you sleep all day (which I did), you might find that you stay up all night. And if you're me, you watch tv. So I'm caught up in a documentary of the Swedish band ABBA.

Before that, there was a road trip of young college students going around in a Winebago interviewing people on their definition of success.

Before that...I played many games of Bookworm, one of my favorite Yahoo! games. I also have playend multiple games of Free Cell, getting my winning time down to 3 or so minutes.

Tomorrow my parents will be here and we'll go to Pamela's for breakfast and then Bellefield Presbyterian Church at ten. I've been going to BPC for over ten years--since 1989, actually. I was on a bus, and I saw oh, look, a Presbyterian church, I guess I'll go there, since it was walking distance from Carlow (then College, now University), where I was a freshman Writing major. I hadn't really thought whether or not I'd be going to church as a college student, but Bellefield welcomed me in and so I kept coming back. I have left Pittsburgh twice and returned to Bellefield both times. I have left Bellefield twice and returned twice. It has a hold on my heart, I guess. Churches grow, change pastors, change members. They expand, contract. Bellefield actually in 1969 was a church on Bellefield Street (confused yet?) and First United Presbyterian Church was on Thackery St. But both churches were failing, and so the Presbytery (the denominational organization) said join up or we'll close you both. That's a real simplified version, but basically the compromise was to take the name of the one church, Bellefield, and the building of the other, First United. Some of the old hymnals that are falling apart still say "First United Presbyterian Church" on them. Right now, Bellefield is growing in a different way--not only is standing room only a regular occurrence during the school year (the congregation is made up of many college students from CMU, Pitt, and Carlow because of the geographic proximity), but we are also "planting a church" which means we have a new congregation called the Open Door that will be relocating in September. I'll be able to walk to church! We'll be located at the Union Project at the corners of Stanton and Negley Avenues. If you've been reading for awhile, a couple posts ago, I praised my friends. Many of those friends are folks I know through BPC or the Open Door--we are studying the book of Acts this summer, where chapter 2, verse 44 describes what I've been experiencing this summer: "And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need." People have been giving me rides, buying me dinner, fixing my car, letting me sleep in their guest beds, and I have been trying to pass around the grace given me--tonight I visited my waitress friend and it was great b/c she said, I'm so glad you came, we were watching the paint peel off the walls.