Hi boys and girls!
As many of you already know, we have officially left Los Angeles for now, and we're embarking on the new adventure that is The Hub (of the universe)...
Here are some various thoughts from our last week and a half or so in LA.
--- De Rerum (on stuff...)
Is it not amazing how attached we get to our things? It first hit me as I sifted and sorted through our sundries in an effort to organize our first ever yard sale... A pair of pants here, a stack of xbox games there, a projector o'er yonder... Before long, I was sort of depressed, and the cheap lady trying to nickel and dime me out of our TV was not helping...
This hit me the hardest though when we emptied our apartment. After the longest most exhausting day on record, Lisa, Joshua and I worked on the last odds and ends. Thank God Maria had come over to clean up a bit earlier in the day, we might have been there until midnight!
About Eight O'Clock we finished up in the bedroom, and I could feel it coming... I handed off the last box to Josh, took Lisa by the hand, and closed the bedroom door behind us. There, in the dark, with the street lights coming in through the blinds, with the imprint of our box spring on the recently vacuumed carpet, with the memories of the last three years flashing before our exhausted hearts: we wept together.
There are thousands of apartments in Glendale, all of them had a roof, and a stove. Indoor plumbing and a kitchen sink. It was just space that we were renting, it didn't even belong to us, and yet somehow this space, these walls and fixtures and appliances, and especially those indentations in the floor - this was ours. And that's why we wept. Because now more than ever we bore the full weight of the tense of that "was". This space. Was. ours... Don't judge me! you would have cried too......
-- De Paribus Condere (On Building Together)
The thing I realized about selling all my stuff and vacating my space was that it wasn't so much the material things that made me sad, it was the relationships, or more accurately the time spent with people, that made this stuff so meaningful.
Take that bedroom for example: This was the room that we ran to as our family's sanctuary, a place where stubbornness and mean-spiritedness could be brushed aside, and peace could be restored with the help of some genuine prayer.
The projector? That reminded me of all those great times with our kids, the JHTMs, the movie nights, the lessons, the Halo...
The things that really matter are not things at all, it's the people that matter. Well, not really... It's the time that we spent with those people, the moments and conversations and meals that God used like bricks to build strong, close relationships.
-- Et Cetera (and other stuff...)
What a great group of folks we were blessed to become close to... Adam and family, all those junior high (now high school i guess...) kids and their families. All these college and single friends that went and got married (Reynas, Rodriguezs, Orozcos, Halls, Johnstons, Basas........) and even all those cool people that we witnessed us slacking off at work/school (Mohit, Roberto, Paula.....) YOU! You are the reason leaving Los Angeles was so hard...
If it wasn't for you being all friendly and giving, leaving would have been easy!
Thank You.
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