columbia
-
thanksgiving day, 2013.
-
friends near and far.
These guys were in SC for a conference last week and drove to Columbia to see us! We became friends with both of them in South Asia — Jonathan and his family are still living there and John is in the States for grad school. It makes me so happy whenever we get to see our South Asia friends, but also sad. We miss them all very much. It feels strange that just over a week away is our three-year anniversary of moving to that big, busy, loud, dirty, colorful city. David and I sometimes joke that we’ve aged ten years in these past three. I’ll always count our life…
-
grandpa and mum-mum.
I’ve been trying to do more living-in-the-moment and less photographing-every-moment lately which is nice, but a sad result is that I’m failing to document some of our fun memories of the year. We spent this past weekend with David’s parents and loved being able to show them our new house — thankfully David snapped a few photos with his phone. After family breakfast at The Gourmet Shop on Saturday morning, Linda and I did some shopping downtown while the men took Judah and Amie to “Repticon,” a reptile show at the Jamil Temple. Anything at the Jamil Temple is sure to be a cultural experience and from what I hear…
-
lately.
Ever since church services started, life seems to be flying by at a startling rate. Most Sunday mornings David and I look at each other and say, “Wait, didn’t we just do this?” We absolutely love our life. We love David’s job. We love our church family. We love the rhythm that Columbia Presbyterian brings to our days. But somehow this incessant rhythm makes whole weeks slip by; I sit down and look at the blog and realize I haven’t posted in over ten days and I don’t know where those ten days went. For the first time I understand my newly empty-nester friends who warn us that the years…
-
a year ago.
A year ago, just as the South Carolina mornings turned crisp and the trees were tinged with flaming orange, we signed a lease and moved into a house in downtown Columbia. We brought with us a mound of suitcases and a few storage bins pulled from the recesses of my parents’ and brother’s attic. Oh and books. Lots and lots of books. Our furniture and bedding and dishes were somewhere in the ocean on their way from Asia so we pieced together a mish-mash of borrowed, hand-me-down, and Ikea pieces those first two months. The house felt a little barren with its rug-less floors, its futon/sofa and Tupperware bin-end tables. The…
-
she says.
Amie’s prayer in the car before the first service at Columbia Presbyterian Church: Dear Jesus, thank you for God’s church. Thank you for helping Daddy and his friends build us a church so we don’t have to keep going to new churches. Amen.
-
cook out.
One of the sweetest gifts God’s given us since we decided to settle in Columbia is the opportunity to befriend South Asians. David met a young couple from Nepal at the beginning of the summer and much to their surprise struck up a conversation in Hindi. They’re expecting their first baby any day now and we’ve loved the opportunity to become part of their lives these last couple months.
-
practice service.
We hesitated to call this Sunday’s worship service with our core group a “practice service” because of course such a thing doesn’t exist. There’s no “practice” in the family of God because the Holy Spirit is always with us and everything we do, whether it’s building sound panels or buying office furniture or tuning a guitar or texting a new friend, is real worship. But having said all of that, with the full knowledge that we are a garden and not a corporation, it still takes an enormous amount of work to gather for worship as a group. It takes knowing where the bathrooms are and whether the children’s space…
-
weekend.
We got home from PA on Tuesday evening, and somehow the succession of days since then has run together in a blur of craziness. Not so much crazy for the kids and me as crazy for David and the guys working on our church meeting space. We’ve barely seen him since we got home, and so the days have been long for all of us. This is the very hardest part, I believe. This building and scrambling and trying to get everything done right. And all with a project David has never done before — one that is very different from planting a church. But God is faithful. He is…
-
moving day.
We did it! Moving Day is over. I’m overwhelmed by our friends and family who worked hard with us to make this possible. We loved our first evening in our new house, can’t wait to keep settling in.