God is Moving ... And So Are WE!!!

I promised a post on WHY we've decided to move after such a short stint here at *this* new house! :-) If you're pressed for time, the short answer is: we need to be closer to Mike's office and our church. The long reason (in true Julie fashion!) follows:

To make a very, very long story short, we feel very confident that God has called us to live in the city that is about 20 miles north of here ... not the town we currently live in (I'm leaving out specific names here since this is on the Internet for all to read!!). We missed that calling two years ago when Mike got the job he has now.

Suffice it to say that when Mike finished his B.S. degree in 2004, we prayed very, VERY specifically for God to use Mike's career search to take us to the city HE [God] wanted us to be in and where HE wanted to USE us for His purposes. Mike applied for and interviewed for jobs all over the country: Kansas, California, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina. Where did Mike get a job? [Name of city where we are moving]. Not [name of town where we currently live). Not [name of town where we used to live]. In fact, he got a job in the very same zip code as our church (coincidence? Perhaps, but perhaps not). In retrospect, we can't believe how OBVIOUS it was that the location of Mike's new job was a very specific answer to a very specific prayer, but miss it we did and trust us, we feel sufficiently stupid for having done so! ;-)

Not realizing then that the "community culture" here is NOT a "greater metropolitan area" like it is in DC (where we're from) where you can have deep relationships with people who live 45 minutes away, we figured we could still live where we wanted to here, but let Mike commute to work and we could continue driving 35-40 minutes to church. Well, that has just turned out to not be the case. We really want to be more involved with our church. We want to get to know our friends there more and most importantly, we want our kids involved. But, that's not reality here when we live so far from the area in which those people live, work and school. We have our friends here -- and that is not to be undermined -- we LOVE our friends. And we're close to our family, but nevertheless, we feel pressed to be in deeper relationships with the people and ministries of our church and that's not going to happen for as long as we are living apart from that community.

On a practical level, the commute to work is killing our budget (gas is about $2.91/gallon here at the moment) and Mike is simply done driving almost an hour each way to work. D.O.N.E. Done. The location of his office is not going to change and the traffic isn't going to improve with time, so in order to get him closer to home and have more time with the family and less time in the car, we must move.

On the church level, we had decided to visit a local church here in our town, just to make sure that maybe we weren't being stirred to change churches. Our visit to the other church in March was actually great. We felt comfortable, welcomed and enjoyed the service. Our kids loved it. Lots of their friends from our homeschool group and their soccer teams attend that church, so it was neat to see them having such a great time with their buddies. It was so hard for us to come home that day and "analyze" our experience, but we talked and talked and prayed and talked together (which, really, was a great time for us as a couple!). And through that, we realized (after the fact) that God's purpose for stirring our hearts to visit that church was not to facilitate a change in church families for us as we had originally thought, but to facilitate between Mike and I a LOOOONG conversation where we were able to discern God's specific calling for our family: we are now 100% confident that God has called us to be part of the Anglican Mission in America through Church of the Apostles and we are so excited to serve Jesus through that mission. But, to be effective in this community culture, that means we need to be living, working, shopping, schooling, etc. *in that community* ....... and thus, we must move. (And here I said I was giving you the short version!!! HA!!)

We really thought it would still be *at least* another year or so before the financial door would be opened for us to be able to move, so we just started praying for God to work in mighty ways to provide for us to be able to do that. Well, we found out about two or three weeks ago that the financial door is actually standing wide open right now, so we're going to step out in faith and ask God to use "the process" to open and close doors and speak to us in mighty and powerful ways.