Our new city...the next steps for Us!

It's official! We are headed to the land of REI, coffee shops, mountains, water, hiking trails, fall colors, organic food, obsessive recycling, and GREEN! Yup, that's right, we're headed to the Emerald City for this next chapter in life! My husband took a job as the junior and senior high youth director at a church and will begin in late January. We are both so excited and feel really confident that this is where God wants us, as He has made that clear in SO many ways. After several years now of dreaming, praying, talking and wrestling with what life after seminary might look like for us, I can't tell you how good it feels to finally have an answer! Having spent 6 years in Seattle, I am super excited to head back, it really is my favorite city in the country, and I am thrilled to get to introduce SurferDude to this beautiful place. Last night he was playing with maps on line looking more at the Seattle area, when he turned to me and said "I am getting so excited! This is gonna be a really good place for our new family." I agree :) We're already grieving saying goodbye to friends and community here (and our youth group kids, we're very sad to be leaving them) :( . But we also know that Pasadena isn't where we are being called to stay, it's time for us to head elsewhere.

We have a lot of support in Seatte, which we are very grateful for--between my close college friends who are still there and my "home" church where we have a community of folks who have been an incredible encouragement already, providing us referrals of realtors, prayers, insurance agents, and rave reviews of our new church! My mom's entire extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins live just north of Seattle, within an hour away, and I'm excited to come back and re-connect a little with them now that we're all adults.

We have so many things we love about our new church, it really was clear that this is such a healthy place, and this is going to be such a great place to serve out of, and be loved by (both of which are crucial for new ministers!) Our new senior pastor is phenomenal. We loved his preaching, the compassion and care he has demonstrated to both of us throughout this whole process of praying and wrestling with decisions. Their interim associate pastor is a professor at Fuller's northwest campus and he seems phenomenal, we love that the church has some strong Fuller connections. The committee members we stayed with and got to know were people that we immediately knew we could be friends with, people we wanted to spend more time with. It's a church that so obviously cares about their teenagers, and has in place so many things we love, things we had always dreamed of implementing wherever we went. We are confident that God has been moving through this whole process, and that He has prepared a community for us--and we are so grateful.

Everyone keeps asking me "okay, so what will you do?" To be honest, I'm not positive yet--and I probably won't know anything until we get there. We do know we don't want to be working in different churches, that feels tough on a family, so we are committed to being part of one community. If a door opens for me to become part of the church staff as well down the line, that would be fantastic, but if not, there are SO many ways to volunteer within the church that I'm not worried about being bored. Seattle is also home to some incredible non-profits like World Vision, New Horizons (a fantastic ministry to homeless youth in Seattle that many of my friends have worked with), Bread for the World, and other great organizations doing powerful ministry around the world that I'd be happy to apply at as well. So we're staying open to many possibilities for what might be in store for me in the next year or so--whether that is a new career, extensive volunteer opportunities, or starting to explore beginning a family. Stay tuned as God continues to lead us!