March 21 - First Sunday

I have been college for 5 1/2 years. I have been apart of a church in Greensboro. So now that I am back home in Charlotte, Randy and I need to find a home church. My parents have a church they go to which is a great church, but Randy and I feel like we need to find a church for ourselves. This brings us to this church adventure on finding a home church.

We decided that we need to start somewhere; so I was talking to a friend of mine at school in Greensboro, who is from Huntersville, NC. This is about 20 minutes away from where we live. She told me about a church that she goes to and loves. They have 2 services on Sundays and a service on Tuesdays to go deeper into the sermon that was on Sunday. I thought "what a great idea, they really care about what the preacher is saying and how to apply it to life." The name of the church is New Birth Charlotte. So when I came home I told Randy about it, and thought that this church would be cool to try out. I looked it up online to see what it was about. There was a black preacher on the front page. I told Randy about it, but the rest of the site it looked to be a mixed congregation. I was fine with it being a black preacher and so was Randy. So we decided to try it out. It took about 20 to 30 mins to get there, and we pulled up. There were so many cars parked. As we were looking around we saw only black people. I have only been to an only black church once on a mission trip we took. It was a great church. So we didn’t really know what to expect. Soon I realized this might be a 3 hour service after all, the only problem with that is that I had to be at work at 12 and we went to the 8:30 service.
We walk in the building, which is beautiful, and we were greeted so lovingly. They gave us hugs and welcomed us as if they have known us forever. It was very nice. We walked in the sanctuary to go sit down, but I wanted to sit at the end just in case I needed to leave to go to work. But they told us to sit in the middle of the row towards the front. This is also because we got there early. I sat beside an extremely nice woman who we talked with for a little bit, And also in front of another. Randy and I noticed that we were 2 of 10 white people in this church.
They finally started singing, people up and down singing and dancing. It was cool. This went on for a while. The dancers were getting ready to come on stage, and I was looking for my friend who dances there. Right before they come on, Randy gets a text saying that he had to go into work. So I told then, when the dancers get done people will stand up then we can leave. The dancers were really good, and I didn’t see my friend. But when they were done some people stood up except the people that needed to let us out. So we had to make our way out while these people are sitting. I felt so bad. I told the lady beside me that we had to go because randy got called into work. As we were making our way to out, I felt we were taking the walk of shame or something. We met a lady at the top of the row that we had to leave because randy was called in. She was very nice about it. I did not want to leave. As we were leaving we saw people still coming in. We looked at the time and we had been in there for about an hour or so. This is different from the churches we are used to because they are only an hour long, and this church didn’t even get to the sermon yet. As we were walking out, Randy asks me, "Melanie is your friend black?" Yes, she is. But I don’t see color with my friends.
The church was great, people were really nice. But the whole situation of not knowing that it was going to be a "black" church caught us off guard. LOL

Next Week is Randy’s turn to find a church...lets see what he picks out.