Living out of boxes...

Well, this weekend is quickly approaching as Daniel and I begin to pack all of our earthly belongings into boxes and start the next step of our journey. As most of you know, we have been living in a very small one bedroom apartment in Antioch for the first year of our marriage. It's a great thing that we love each other so much and that we love spending time together and being close, because we couldn't get away from each other in this place if we tried. Its been a great place to start our lives together, but we are sooooo ready for a change of scenery. We are about to move to a three bedroom, two and a half bath townhouse in Smyrna, TN. This house has been such a blessing to us already and we can really see God's hand working in this move. Its a pretty great story how we came to find this place.

We started looking for places to live about two months ago in the Smyrna area. We knew we wanted to be closer to Murfreesboro (where Daniel goes to school) and we thought that Smyrna was a great small town that would be half-way for both of us to get to school and work. We knew what our budget was and we started spending the weekends perusing Smyrna searching for our next home. I started looking on Craig's list as well. I printed off quite a few possibilities and we started calling around. We found one right before we left for Kansas that stuck out to us, but we didnt have time to go check it out until we got back. There were three contenders when we returned home from Sara's wedding. We went and looked at those three and they were ok, but we still felt uneasy about them. We found the phone number for this house and decided to call. The lady's name was Jaime and she said we could come by and check out the place. As soon as we pulled into the development we knew it was special. Jaime actually is the landlord's daughter and lives right next door. She is our age and has a young son. She goes to school with Daniel at MTSU and we hit it off right away. We stepped into the house and it was beautiful!! The kitchen blew me away and I fell in love immediately with this place. I was a little reluctant because it looked way out of our price range, so we asked her to remind us how much it was. The price was the same as the other ones we had been looking at and it had an extra bedroom!!! Praise the Lord, we were home! Daniel and I spent almost a hour there talking to Jaime and just hanging out. We took the application and left. We got in the car and looked at each other and said..."thats the one". From there we contacted the landlord, Chris, who lives with her husband in Illinois and got all the paperwork worked out. The whole process has been a blessing. We came to find out that Chris has been diagnosed with late stage 3 ovarian cancer and is going through cemo and radiation treatments. It has been amazing to see how God has placed these people into our lives so that we can minister to them and show them God's love. They have done the same for us. I cant wait to see what kind of friendship grows between us and this family over the next few years.

So, as we continue to pack up our stuff and maneuver through the boxes that fill our tiny apartment, please remember us on the 6th of February, and if you are free to help move furniture, we would love to have your help!! Love you all...We will be inviting you over soon.