Arizona Anniversary, Part I

In seventeen days, we will have lived in Arizona for a year. There have been some great times and some really hard times. Holidays have been hard for me, especially Easter because it was the last time I saw my friends at my old church. However, I can't ignore the evidence that we are exactly where God has placed us and that He is providing for ALL our needs--emotional, spiritual, and physical, so I will praise Him for His wisdom even as I am still going through periods of grieving.

I still miss so many people in Illinois. I miss my old church, not because I don't like the new church I am attending but because we are in a different stage of relationship. My relationship with my old church, which had the motto "Come as you are", had reached the "husband" stage. If I was having a bad day and a friend asked me "How are you?" at church, I was completely comfortable to be honest, rather than putting on a "Joel Olsteen" smile and saying "oh fine, just wonderful. God has really blessed me this week." In fact, there were several weeks in the course of a year when I would arrive at church crying because either Eric had just left for another trip to China or because a child had spent the week waking up five times in the night or due to any number of emotional traumas. And they would not just say, "Oh, I'm sorry and I will pray for you" as they walked out the door." Most of the time, they would stop, listen to my sob story and actually pray for me on the spot! And I could do the same for them. Having only one service, there was no rush to get out the door to free up a parking space for the next group. The other reason this church was so special is that it was the first church I had attended where I felt safe enough to join it as a full fledged member. I was a member there for over ten years, which also qualifies it as the church in which I attended the most time, in fact, the only church where I attended for more than a year.

The church we are attending now has great worship, memorably good sermons (the key of a really good sermon is if you can remember it a month later), and friendly people. We are getting to know several of them much better through small group Bible study and other things. However, let's be honest, we are really in more of a "getting serious" stage at this point, when you start to let your guard down a little to see how the person will react. Will they still love me like Jesus if I come to church wailing like Jeremiah or fuming at my kids who have made us late for church AGAIN or will they figuratively freak out at the "wierdo" and stop returning my phone calls? So far, evidence shows that they can handle the emotional garbage I bring to church and small group. One time, God's Spirit literally led me to tears within a few bars of the opening song. Right after I had wiped my eyes, they asked people to shake hands with someone near you. I know I must have looked a mess, even with the dim lights, and I nervously refrained from shaking hands. One lady leaned over and told me that it was okay to cry during worship because she does too. I felt safe. And church should be the place in which you feel safest, aside from your home.

More on my first year in Arizona will be forthcoming.

A day trip to Sedona

I have the greatest husband in the world. An old college room mate called a few months ago to tell me that she would be within a day's drive and would like to meet me at a halfway point. My husband took a day off of work to homeschool our kids so I could go to meet her. He sacrificed one of his few vacation days (as he just started a new job five months ago). I left on Wednesday evening and returned on Thursday evening.

One thing about driving from Phoenix to Sedona is that getting out of Phoenix is roughly half of the driving time, especially in rush hour traffic which is not nearly as bad as Chicago rush hour traffic. Really! Also, Arizona is an awesome place to drive because a lot of the highways have a 75 mile/hour limit once you leave the city. However, there are no road lights, so once night falls, 75 feels pretty fast. It also means that you see nothing except what your headlights illuminate in front of you. So when I drove into Sedona at 7 p.m at night, I didn't see any mountains. Inky blackness extended beyond all the shops, galleries, hotels/motels/inns/resorts and restaurants. Sedona could have been one big valley as far as I was concerned.

However, this is what I woke up to:

Isn't it breathtaking?! The mountains seemed to form layer upon layer. You would get past one layer and find a whole new set of mountains. We got to "rock and roll on a very bad road" to see the ruins of an Native American pueblo built into an awesome cave. There are so many trails to hike that I could spend a week there and still not have explored them all. However, if I had formed my opinion based on what I had seen in the dark, I would have passed it off as merely a tourist trap (which it also is) and missed the glory and splendor that God created. It also made me wonder, however, if the residents of Sedona, the people who wake up to these views 365 days a year ever say to themselves, "Oh yeah. Another beautiful day to look at mountains (yawn). BORING!", or even "Mountains? What mountains?" I mean, really, if you had an awesome view to look at every day of your life, wouldn't it become ordinary and commonplace? Would it lose the luster? You might have to go to Detroit, Michigan (which I did visit once and was not impressed) or Rockford, Illinois (in which I lived for three rotten, no good years) to be able to renew your sense of wonder at your hometown and really appreciate it. At this point, I will leave you develop all the emotional and spiritual lessons that can be gleaned from this insightful insight.

My girlfriend and I had fun chatting about all sorts of stuff, taking a couple of hikes, and shopping, which, because I wasn't hunting for something in particular and because it didn't involve noisy malls, it didn't inspire anymore stanzas to the Malls--How do I hate thee? poem. We had lunch at a western themed restaurant with a fabulous view, too. I think it was the same one at which our family ate when we visited Sedona almost five years ago. I also had a vision for what to do to fill up the shelf high above the dry sink: buy a few, funky, tall, glass vases of different colors and shapes and put one of those rope lights behind them to turn on at night. However, I won't be buying them from the shop in Sedona which inspired my vision, considering one of them was about 1/3 of the cost of a small car.

All in all, it was a wonderful, lovely day in which not one conversation was interrupted by a child's need/scream/question/comment. Thank you, Eric. You are my knight in shining armor!

Taking a stand

I just want to say how great my husband is. He was being asked to go on a trip that would have him be gone for two weeks AND arrive just in time for us to leave on vacation. He managed to work out a way to be part of the meeting without having to actually go to it because, his family comes first. This is especially courageous because there has been a lot of downsizing in the company lately and there is always uncertainty in what will happen to you if you go against the flow. To be fair, another person who was supposed to go isn't because his wife is due to have a baby at any time and the plane trip would take several hours.

My love, you are my hero!