For starters, I bought a house!! It all happened so quickly...mom and dad sold their farm and suddenly found themselves with a large chunk of cash and no idea what to do with it (oh, the trials of life!), so we started toying with the idea of investing in a house together. I've wanted to be a home owner for a long time; renting gets old after a while! But obviously with the housing market in Edmonton being so ridiculously overpriced, and me just being ME, coughing up several hundred thousand dollars wasn't exactly an option. :-) So, in the end we decided to go for it, decided we would split everything right down the middle...started looking around...saw lots of places that were okay but didn't exactly grab me...and then we found THE ONE. It was an older house but had been completely renovated upstairs and downstairs, had a beautiful basement suite that I could rent out, a huge two-car garage, was in a fantastic location...so after much deliberation we put an offer on it, held our breath, waited nervously while competing offers were considered, and at last got the phone call that we had been chosen! So that started a month of mortgage shopping, packing, cleaning, visits to the lawyer, buying insurance, choking over property taxes, and feeling VERY grown up. :-) Haha. Little did I know how much work owning a house would be, but thankfully I'm strangely passionate about mowing the lawn and doing yardwork and shovelling snow and changing lightbulbs and unclogging plugged drains!
Buying a house has also meant leaving behind my years of solitary living, which has obviously been an adjustment...but I knew it was time to give up some of that independence and privacy and learn to live in close community with someone again. Not that it's always easy, but you can't be praying for growth and asking God to take you further and still be playing it safe, I guess! :-) So my friend Diana is living upstairs with me, I've got a great young married couple living in the suite downstairs, and for the most part it's a happy house!
So with moving and settling into the new place, the summer has absolutely flown by...it's kind of scary to look outside and see the leaves lying on the ground and feel the chill in the air, and know that winter's just around the corner. What happened to all the adventures I wanted to have?! I did get to go down to Southern Alberta for a highly anticipated Funk family reunion, which was mostly spent soaking up every minute spent with my precious nieces and nephews and playing hours and hours of competitive volleyball in the hot sun. :-) And I went up to Dawson for a week of good times with my family and old friends there. And made it out to the lake one weekend with some friends. And had a big birthday party to celebrate turning 21...again... :-) Other than that, though, it was a summer of work and real life and lots and lots of weeding!
One exciting thing that's happened...I finally took a big step towards achieving my creative dreams, after years of making excuses for never having enough time to write! :-) It was in August that with fear and trembling (!) and much trepidation I finally approached my big scary boss about going down to part-time at work, to four days a week, so I can devote more time to writing, being creative, going for walks, breathing, sleeping, being with God, doing all the things that revive my soul and bring perspective and joy. Thankfully, he said YES! So now I get every Wednesday off, and it's amazing what a difference it makes...these are the days I live for now! I love being able to sleep in, have a leisurely cup of tea, and ask God what He has in mind for the day. :-) Obviously writing is a long, slow process...but I have a million different ideas on the go now, and someday they'll all come together!
So yeah, that's been the last four months in a nutshell...and now here we are at the start of fall, on the verge of yet another season, and my prayer is the same: I want to be chasing after intimacy with God while at the same time learning to rest, I want to be going deeper in my relationships, I want to be taking risks, I want to be learning to set up healthy boundaries at work and at home, I want to learn how to simply be ME. I want SO much, which is good, but at the end of the day when I'm tempted to let the questions and struggles and the thirst for adventure and purpose rob me of any sort of peace, God still has just one thing to say:
"Stop striving...and know that I am God." And so I keep waiting. And resting. And trusting!
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