Well, the move is now over...the dust has settled and we have a new home. Wednesday and Thursday last week were two of the most difficult days I have had in recent memory. Anything that could go wrong did:
Tuesday:
Landfill closed right before I got there
Wednesday:
Left school during planning period/lunch to dump the load
had to go in and sign to stop Napoleon utilities instead of just over the phone
went to pick up the U-hall and U-hall moved...luckily only down the road
left during the loading of the truck to get cashiers check for closing....bank was closed.
had to run into BG to take care of house insurance
The truck wasn't big enough
Macee saw the empty house and said, "mommy, I scared"
We slept on the floor

Things have gotten better since then, thanks to my wonderful wife, we now have a home where everything is put away and it feels like home already even though we've only been here a couple of days.

I am still not sure how to handle this neighborhood situation I find myself in. We are the only house on our side of the road for this mile stretch we're on. A couple of people from the church live out this way which will be nice, but I still want that sense of community to develop with our neighbors even though they are a 1/4 mile away...the challenge begins...

Saw the Passion of the Christ tonight with a couple hundred youth from the area as our church rented out the theater for an outreach event. I wasn't hammered emotionally hard as I thought I would be...but the visions of some of those scenes just keep flashing though my mind. As I left the theater I just kept saying, "forgive me Lord...forgive me." I am a dirty, dirty, dirty sinner and I am in awe of the beating he took and death he died, for me. Sara and I were discussing it earlier and we both came to the conclusion that we have been challenged to love people even more deeply than we have felt up to this point. Our purpose is for people to see the love of Christ as I saw it portrayed in this film tonight, I just hope that the ugliness of my sin doesn't get in the way of that.

Well,

We will be closing on the new place this week on Thursday after some stressful days of preparation...in fact days of not even knowing if this deal was going to come through, but it appears that everything is falling into place.

I am excited, yet cautious, hopeful, yet gaurded. I will be ready to have this over and done.

On a lighter note, we went to see David Crowder Band again on Thursday this week down in Tipp City. What a treat...
I am not normally "star struck," but this was pretty cool to be able to meet him and the rest of the band. The other two times I had seen him were at big Passion events and this was definately a smaller scale concert.
As we walked into the Avenue(at Ginghamsburg church) I started looking around to get an idea of what the place looked like and low and behold there his, bigger than life, walking right at me. I had two thoughts as I saw him...holy cow that's him, and man he IS tall AND skinny.

After the concert we went to the back and got a couple of autographs(again, not my style, but I felt like a little kid all over again).
So here I sit blogging it up with an autographed David Crowder Band concert T-shirt on and loving every minute of it. This happens to be only my second concert T-shirt in my nearly 30 years of life. The first was a Petra "This Means War" T-shirt that I am almost embarrassed to say I even owned.

One more cool note and I am done for the night. I sold off a lot of my guitars and guitar equipment to buy yet another acoustic so I could trim my collection down to just 2 good acoustics. I found a Washburn NV100 with hardshell case for a fraction of what they are selling even at the cheapest mail order companies. It is the guitar of all guitars, now if it could only make me play better...

It's been tough to blog with things as hectic as they have been.

We closed on our house on Feb. 11th.
We did find another house and we appear to be moving ahead with all of the logistics of a new house, the closing, packing, and the move itself, but it is hard to tell if anything is definate at this point.

My struggle is the difference between the house we were going to buy and the one we are currently going to buy.

The first was in town, small yard, houses almost on top of each other, can't help but run in to the neighbors type of setting.
The latest is in the country, huge yard, BIG barn, surrounded by fields, neighbors 1/2 mile away type of setting.

I was really settling into the close community type of feeling that I was getting from the first place and now we are looking at the polar opposite and I am struggling with that. Geography definately plays a role in building community and having a small house sure helps with the concept of simplicity, but I feel like we are going into a situation unlike where I saw us moving.
I do believe that we are living in the will of Christ for our lives right now, it just isn't turning out like I thought we were being directed. The details of all of this make it obvious that this is where we are supposed to be, it makes it that much more difficult to simplify and form a sense of community in the situation we are headed into. Maybe that is the point, getting us to a place where we must be deliberate about it...I don't know...

It is a scary place to be, when you feel like the last year of your life was preparing you for a certain way of living and now it gets turned upside down...did I miss something?...am I not really listening?...what is this simple life supposed to look like for us?...I thought I new...I guess I didn't

We are taking this "not being tied down too tightly" thing pretty seriously....not by choice but by force. The house we were supposed to be buying fell through. Something about "several leans" and a "3rd mortgage"....

So now we look for another house knowing we have to be out of this house by Feb. 26th. Anyone know where we can crash for a few weeks??? We might just live in the sound booth at church...we'll have one heck of a kitchen downstairs, his/her bathrooms, a huge gymnasium...hey that's not such a bad idea.

Even in the midst of this uncertainty, I am still choosing peace and contentment....

First day back at school today after our 5 day vacation due to the snow and ice...
Good times...

Through this packing time I am finding out that we have more stuff than I even thought we did, and we have only lived in this house just shy of 4 years. I find it amazing how much stuff...absolute junk, we have collected. This continues to reinforce to me that we need to continue to simplify our lives and get rid of the stuff that ties us down and distracts us from the real purposes of our existence.

I am reminded of a Charlie Hall song:

Cut the things that slow me down, 'cause I'm tired of sinking down
Take the rope now off my neck, swim away from this shipwreck
Simplify my life by letting go
I want to yield and burn with truths I know
I'm learning how to lose myself again
Swimming back to You

I couldn't have written it any more clearly myself...