Now 8 Months & Counting!

Last time we posted, it was at our 7-month anniversary. What have we been doing for a month? Well, we've been wrapping things up at The Gathering Chrurch - Chris had his last Fearless small group last Wednesday night, we had our last Sunday serving as the interum leaders for the Middle School group and this Saturday will be our last youth event with the Middle School Group. So this month had lots of lasts. I know Chris will really miss these guys. I thank the Lord for giving us such sweet closure to our years of serving them.

We also took our house off the market at the beginning of the month and spent the month doing the whole HGTV-like staging thing on the inside and lots of landscaping on the outside. The landscaping would have been more fun if it wasn't warm all week, then cold & windy each weekend that we set aside to do the work! The inside is now a lot less personal. We are struggling with that a bit because we still have to live in the house for an indefinite amount of time and we are tired of taking our pictures down and not getting to have our sweet memories around us. We will hopefully be putting the house back on the market soon. It is hard not to be discouraged, but we still see that the Lord is calling us to Boston, so our house will sell in His timing. We are doing what we can and leaving the rest in His hands.

In the meantime, we will be camping on the weekends this summer to give us some much needed rest and time away from our ever-demanding jobs. They take a lot out of us during the week, so it will be nice to have our weekends back to dedicate to renewal & restoration of our tired bodies & spirits! This is one of our favorite places that we'll be backpacking to =)

7 Months and Counting

Whew! It is amazing how fast time flies. It does not seem like one-plus year since I asked Allie to marry me, Easter of 2007. Since then, we have both matured personally and learned so much about God, how He's made us, and where He's leading us. It is pretty cool, really, to look back and be totally convinced that we could not have come up with such a crazy adventure, not even in our most creative of moments.
Here is a recap of what has happened this last year and where we feel that God is taking us:

April 8, 2007: Allie and I are engaged to be married!!
April 24, 2007: I start working at Family Life Services.
August 14-21, 2007: We visit Boston and I get to experience the Northeast for the first time (Allie's home). Allie also starts working at Flooring America in early August.
September 29, 2007: Allie and I are married!! We could not have asked for more support and a better start to our lives together. God is so good.
September 30-October 15, 2007: We honeymoon in Vermont and fall in love with this part of the country. God plants seeds of desire in our hearts to move there one day.
October 15-May 6, 2008: Allie and I grow to love each other more each day. We experience the faithfulness of God in the hard times; we continue to learn that He has a crazy plan for us, and we both become convinced that we are compelled to come alongside hurting people.
One of those hurting people is pictured to the left. This young man and his younger brother are in the midst of grieving the loss of their father, who took his own life two weeks ago. Allie and I have known them for a couple years; it has been difficult to hear the questions and see the hurt in their eyes and not know quite what to say. But we are both confident that it is not our job heal the hurt these boys are feeling. God heals people. I suppose it is our job to love these boys and be "Jesus with clothes on" for them. If you remember, please pray for those two young men.

Whatever the future holds, Allie and I both know that it will be better than anything we could have planned. Along with plans to move to the Boston area, we are thinking about graduate school options. It seems like a lot right now, but that is because we are in the midst of it all. Thankfully, we are following a God who doesn't say "uh-oh."

Oh, and read Psalm 37. It's a good one.