Please excuse the melancholy

Moving charges you to sit up and take note of things that you'd previously taken for granted. Time, for example. Fort Worth. Friends.

Ross and I went to a wedding in Austin this weekend and drove home last night. It's always nice to come home but at the same time, I realized the finality of our decision to move to Kansas. Come Friday, when we click "Take Me Home" on the GPS, it will no longer lead us to the Stonegate Villas where I've lived for 2 years and Ross for 1. This is our last Sunday living in Texas and try as I might, I can't wrap my head around it. At the same time, it hovers like the clouds in the sky right now and creates a fog around me. I can't escape it.

I was reading Eat, Pray, Love again last week and this passage caught my eye:
"I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all these acquisitions and accomplishments-- they run you down in the end. Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time-- when pursued like a bandit-- will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you [or one city behind you], changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping our the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it."
-Elizabeth Gilbert

We do have plenty of things to look forward to in Kansas, but right now I'm going to focus some more on the wonders of Texas:

Christ Chapel

We went to Christ Chapel one last time this morning and loved Ted's sermon, as usual! It's going to be quite a mission to find another church we both agree on as wholeheartedly as this one. Pray that our search is short and fruitful. It's going to be very easy to get caught in "church searching." In Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, Screwtape (a highly placed assistant to the devil) writes to his nephew Wormwood (a demon):
"Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference this (fidelity to one church) is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that 'suits' him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches."

For those who haven't read the book, Screwtape is coaching his nephew who is in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary man. The book is satire, of course. When they say that fidelity to one church is a "bad thing," the Christian reading it should interpret fidelity as a wonderful thing indeed which, as long as the fidelity isn't due to indifference, can bring us closer to God and our church community.

Hmm... that was quite the segue. Point being, we love Christ Chapel and will miss it!

Friends

Ross went to A&M and many of his friends are now scattered from coast to coast in various grad schools. We got to see a lot of them at the aforementioned wedding in Austin, though. There also happened to be a lot of the same people at Andrew's wedding who were at Mark and Merrell's wedding where Ross and I met over 2 years ago!

My Groomsman and Me

Ross and Mark

Gus, Andrew (the groom), and Ross

Since I went to TCU right here in Fort Worth, I do see a few school friends a little more frequently. By "a few" I mean 3. I got to see Emily Campbell and her cute 20-week baby belly while chaperoning Victory last month! Amanda Schaum and her husband don't live too far from us, but our schedules always conflict and we don't get to see each other much. We're not too worried, though, because they may actually end up in Kansas City with us soon so Amanda can go to KU for grad school as well. Kate Box and her husband are WONDERFUL, but they live in Plano so it's always an ordeal to get together.

Then we have Brittnye and Evan Hartfield whom we met through Nick and Kate. Brittnye and I love walking and talking and baking. She doesn't mind listening to me talk about "my babies" at work because she has a baby of her own-- sweet Avery who is already 10 months old! Evan is in architecture school right now, so he and Ross have plenty to talk about even when us girls aren't around. We love Nick Box for introducing us, but curse him for not doing so sooner! Our only small consolation is the fact that Evan has relatives in Missouri so we may be able to convince them to visit us every now and then.

Brittnye and me with our homemade pie!

I don't know if this falls in the "friends" category, but for the past two years, I've been babysitting for two precious boys aged 2 and 4. I met them when the youngest one was only 6 weeks old and I fell in love instantly! Now they both run around and chatter at a mile a minute and I will miss them dearly. Their parents are wonderful and if we were staying in Fort Worth, they'd be amazing mentors when Ross and I start to have kids in a few years. They're throwing us a going away dinner tonight but I really feel like we should be doing something for them instead! Going to their house makes me feel so happy and "at home." It's been a good steady base for me when everything else was changing (graduation, night shift, wedding stuff, moving).

We are incredibly blessed here! I just have to keep remembering what Mark and Merrell said to us this weekend: it'll be fun to make KC/Lawrence "our" city like they did when they moved to Denver. For now, it's time to go enjoy the time we do have left here with people we love!