“Whelp… it looks like we aren’t going to be able to pay you as much as we thought.”
Oh no.
We have uprooted and moved our everything 2000 miles to discover that this Music Ministry position will pay less than half the salary that was promised. Thanks, Church board, you guys are the best. Okay, well yeah, we probably should have asked for a contract before moving clear across the country, but it’s a church! These people are good Christians. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, I know now, but I was spectacularly naive about church at the time. Welcome to sunny Los Angeles, here’s your kick in the pants. At least I get to wear them now.
This is going to be a problem, a how-will-we-afford-to-live-here-now dilemma that is exacerbated by some uninformed person at the Department of Licensing in California giving me misinformation about my state cosmetology license. I will not be able to work as a hairdresser here, either. Uh oh…two jobs gone in a POOF of unpredictable smoke.
And what the exact cornbread hell are we doing in L.A. anyway? DH has decided he would like to become a pastor, and has hand-picked John MacArthur’s extremely conservative yet absolutely NOT Charismatic or Pentecostal Master’s Seminary, and it is in Sun Valley, a suburb of L.A. The music ministry position in which we’re getting the shaft is at a Baptist church in nearby Woodland Hills, where the pastor is very uncomfortably explaining to us that the salary for the ministry position is less than half what was agreed upon.
We are in biiiig trouble.
Let’s back up a bit…
After a full summer of working at a North Carolina camp that turned out to be a bit wacko, we had crammed everything right back into the CRX and retreated, the nausea-inducing switchbacks of the Blue Ridge Mountains fading into the past. We had two weeks total to get back to Tiny Town, throw everything into a U-Haul, hook up a tow rig for my precious CRX, and haul our crazy asses the 2000 miles to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, for the uninitiated, is insanely packed with people. Almost 19 million in the greater L.A. area, while the STATE of Wisconsin has 5.8 million. I grew up in Chicago, where an hour’s drive will take you out of the city, while in L.A., you can drive for hours and still be looking at endless urban sprawl. It’s not even urban sprawl, it’s an ocean of three-story or less buildings, an odd landscape created by earthquake being an option on the California menu. It makes for a very different city, having been raised near the skyscrapers and hi-rises of Chicago.
We arrive on a sunny day, because of course it is. Everyday L.A, almost annoyingly sunny. The residents there are excited when they “have weather” because it’s usually just the same old sunny day. The undesirable side effect of this continual lack of rain, is if someone spits on the sidewalk, or loses their lunch, or spills anything at all, it remains untouched possibly for months. The petrified garbage of SoCal, an enduring monument to filth.
Back to our dilemma, we are living with Pastor Good and his family, they are really wonderful people who genuinely aspire to live according to the best bits of the Bible, being a loving, caring clan who are compassionate and consistently do the right thing. They are all great.
The congregation… not so great.
After having dealt with some pastors who weren’t exactly the best, here the situation was flip-flopped, Pastor Good was… well, good, and much of the membership was awful. They were going through pastors like whiskey at an Irish funeral, and once I spent some time around the congregation, I could see why. Gossipy, mean-spirited, overly pious and self-righteous, there was a core of people here who had been puppeteering the leadership for wayyy too many years. I think of it as upside-down church, in which the congregation basically tells the pastor what to do. This will eventually end in a horrific meeting in which insults and personal attacks are launched at Pastor Good and his family, resulting in their loss of yet another pastor, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
So. Here we are in Los Angeles, and we have a month of staying with Pastor Good to find a place of our own, because Pastor Good really isn’t supposed to have extra people staying in his condo, which presents us with an interesting dilemma: with both of our jobs having fallen through, how are we supposed to pay for all of this?
See if you can figure out what happened next.
I NEVER could have guessed.
Worship Leader Gone Wild 