a little of everything

June has proved to be a little busier than I thought it would be. I am not sure if we have physically been busy...more emotionally busy. A lot of transition is happening in my office. It all started at the end of May and has continued throughout June. I am really hoping that things will settle down soon. I have found over the years of my life that I handle stress in some negative ways. I will, for example, sleep a lot or get really sick or withdraw from things. And stuff at work has provoked this type of behavior in me. It is funny, I talk to my mom about the fact that I am sick or really tired, and she confirms that I have always been this way when there is an abundance of stress in my life. At church the past two weeks, the series has been about responding to life in the up, down, and everything in between. We talked about worry and our circumstances and claiming God's promises. Isn't it amazing how timely church sermons can be. You might think that God was there or something :)

Paul and I have pretty much settled into the routine with Paul's job. We have enjoyed being home in the evenings together. If we aren't home it is for social occasions, not work. We miss InterVarsity but have welcomed this new pace of life. We have been in a place of savoring the rest (except obviously what I just wrote about). Ministry is tiring. And, we have needed some time to just "be". I think the rest of the summer will be about that.

We are moving in a week! YEAH. We found a house close to our good friends, Casey and Adam. We are so excited about it. Our apartment has been a great place to live, but we are really ready for more space and a new neighborhood. We intentionally looked for a house within about one square mile of our friends. We have been praying about being able to live close enough for our lives to intersect on a regular basis...we want to "do" life with them. That means we have to live close enough to be spontaneous. So, we looked and looked and looked for a house to rent. And have prayed and prayed and prayed. Nothing was coming open in our price range. The house we ended up getting was one that I really liked the outside of but was too much money. Then, I noticed that the price dropped significantly. We moved very quickly with signing a lease. The house has a big living room (which was important to us), 3 bedrooms, a bathroom (it is only the two of us, so we can handle that), a nice sized kitchen, big backyard, garage and lots of storage space. I think we will really like it. We will be living 6 blocks from our friends...which is under half a mile. The move begins this next weekend. We have already started packing up our apartment. We are both super excited but also a little sad to be leaving our first home together. In a lot of ways, it feels like we are exiting the "newlywed" stage of our marriage and entering a "young marrieds" stage...I am not sure what you would call this new stage, but we are in a different place. We have labored through our first really big fights and come out on the other side. We are still learning how to love each other well but have more of an idea of what that looks like. We really like this phase of marriage.

Speaking of marriage...we will be celebrating our second wedding anniversary on July 9. We have been trying to figure out how to celebrate. Last year, we were in Cabo San Lucas. We want our anniversaries to be a big deal...especially in this age of treating the marriage covenant very flippantly. Since we are moving, we have decided to celebrate a week or so later than our actual anniversary. BUT, we can't decide what to do. We would love to get away for a weekend. We've thought about Santa Fe, Taos, Dallas. We don't want to spend a whole day driving, but when you live in Lubbock, it is hard not to. Any suggestions???

We will post pics of the new house soon.