The Summer of Change

I know that we are now well into fall, but I want to recap our summer so I can remember how much things changed over the course of a few weeks.

You know how sometimes you make a decision, and that decision just forces another decision and another -- kind of like dominos falling? Well, that about sums up our summer.

In early June, Matt & I began talking about the next year. He was done with his Ph.D. coursework -- like 55 hours -- and we were finally to the countdown to being done with this thing. We've always planned to stay here 5-6 years until Matt finished his degree and then start looking at moving to another university for him to work. Since he's getting his Ph.D. from a research university, we have tons of options -- he's pretty much qualified to go anywhere. And with his teacher experience and college teaching experience (thanks to adjuncting) he's going to have an amazing Vita.

But, the more we talked about moving the more we talked about how much we love Fayetteville and NWA in general. We like our school district and we especially love how we live in a very small down outside of F'ville but are so close to so many cool things. It just felt like a chore to have to up and move when we are so happy.

However, there were a few things that weren't quite what we wanted. While Matt was grateful for his job at Ramay, he discovered last year that he didn't love administration -- which was what he was doing most of the time there. And, this year he was going to add back some classes to teach, which would be adding to his work load because of the planning time. We knew that the district wasn't adding any new jobs, and by August things have settled and the Math Coaching job that Matt would have loved wasn't open -- the girl from last year was staying in that role. So, we hunkered down for a long year and hoped for the best. And, then, 2 weeks before school started, she quit. And in a matter of about a day Matt had the job. Woohoo. I keep thinking of this as "the answered prayer we never prayed." I think we'd both thought that all of the job changing was done, and we praying that next year there would be an opening. But, our prayer was answered much sooner than we'd thought and it's been such a blessing.

This meant that we could stay in Fayetteville with Matt at a job that he not only loved, but was very well qualified to do! He's now the Middle & Jr. High Matt Coach and he works with all those math teachers and 5 different schools. It's a BIG job for him, but he's going to do great things with it, I just know.

The biggest change and the toughest decision we made this summer was to change churches. We've loved our church in Springdale, but honestly it's been tough. We live farther away from church than all of our friends and we live in the totally opposite direction as well. It meant that our kids didn't go to school with any church friends and they didn't live near any of them. It's been something that we've been thinking about for many months and praying fervently about for those months.

After much prayer, Matt really thought that we needed to worship the community where we lived and he worked. We changed to a church where that is much closer and they even have families that live in our neighborhood! It gives our kids the chance to form friendships with kids that live close enough that we can have playdates.

Ultimately it's going to be a really good for our family and we are already trying to get plugged in. We will miss our friends from our old church, but I'm thankful that we live close enough that we can see them often!

There are some things that we really love about our new church -- they do Lads to Leaders and Madeleine can participate in that starting in a few weeks. Madeleine's class at church has a Bible Memory verse to learn each week. It's perhaps a little more traditional, but Matt & I are a little more traditional and it's a good fit. They have a great Sunday night program for the kids and it's bothered us for some time that our kids were playing while we got to participate in our small group. Not that Matt & I didn't need that time, but we are still getting something only now our kids are learning as well. That's something that is most important to us.

So, it's been a summer full of changes for us -- new school for the kids, new church, new job for Matt. Sometimes I almost feel as if we've moved! But, it's also been a summer filled with some big answered prayers.