Well, we’ve been in our new place coming up on three months.
Let me give you the grand tour... it will only take a minute. It's just five small rooms... 940 square feet...
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| Welcome to our little place... |
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| You enter through our kitchen & dining room... |
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| & come on into our living room... |
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| just around the corner is Hani's room... |
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| then it's down the hall... |
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| to our little bathroom |
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| & finally to our bedroom/office |
As you can see, all of our boxes have been unpacked, we’ve taken the last bag to the Goodwill
& we are settled in to our cozy little space & into our new rhythm of life.
While I don’t
want to take this opportunity to beat a dead horse, I would really like to take
a minute to share with you how much our lives have changed & some of the
unexpected blessings we have experienced along the way. Not to mention to put a little
closure to the physical downsize we have completed…
There is
real beauty in the simplicity.
I don’t have
anything that I don’t use or enjoy every day. We have everything we need. &
surprisingly, even the things I was really dreading, like not having a washer
& dryer in my unit, haven’t really been a big deal. Chuck & I share a
lot of the household duties, Hannah does her part & quite frankly it feels
like we are more of a team here. I am sure it helps that we can clean our new
place from top to bottom in the span of 40 minutes.
I have to
admit, I really love the freedom & the peace this place affords us. With
the money we are saving on our rent, we’ve been able to give where we see need
& with the time we would have spent taking care of our home & our pets
we’ve been able to invest in each other & in nurturing our relationships with other people.
In fact, we’ve
had more company in the past three months in our tiny apartment than we had in
the past six years in our big house. At first I thought it might be because
people are curious about how we may be ‘suffering’ in our space but as time
goes on, I’m finding myself inviting people more often to come, relax, share a
cup of tea or a meal or to simply share their hearts.
And as our patterns
& priorities begin to shift, something else has been happening deep in our
hearts… we are beginning to love the people in our church & in our community in a way we haven’t before. We are
learning that gaining numbers isn’t as important as making disciples, that being
a church that is wide with people isn’t as important as a church that is deep
with spiritual depth, & that fruitfulness is far more important than success.
We are finding that that we are called to go deeper... David Kinnaman says, in his book, ‘Unchristian: What a New Generation Really
Thinks about Christianity and Why It Matters’… “Most
people in America, when they are exposed to the Christian faith, are not being
transformed. They take one step into the door, and the journey ends. They are
not being allowed, encouraged, or equipped to love or to think like Christ. Yet
in many ways a focus on spiritual formation fits what a new generation is
really seeking. Transformation is a process, a journey, not a one-time
decision.”
We must strive to do this by deepening in our relationships with God, by encouraging & loving each other & by giving ourselves away to those God has given us to nurture.
