New Year

It has been a hectic yet fun last couple weeks.

Stephen, Jess, and Mengning were here for a great week/end, and my parents as well, right before Christmas.

We had to have all our stuff in the church house we lived in in the basement by the morning of the 23rd. By God's kind providence (lucky for us, lots of work for Stephen) Stephen was here AGAIN to help us move. : ) We got the house packed and cleaned and left for vacation to South Carolina to visit Bobby's grandparents and dad's side of the family the next day. Due to a broken train on the way to the airport, we missed our flight...but ended up taking the Carolinian Amtrak instead (DC to Charlotte in eleven hours).

We had a great time celebrating Christmas and Bobby's g-parents 50th anniversary. Praise God for such kindness in preserving them and their marriage this far! It was good and exciting for me to hang out with the entire family and get grafted in a bit more. I also got to spend some time with the dear Emily Heath. She stopped on her way from Murrells Inlet to Asheville and we got to spend the morning together.

For the last ten days we have been houseguests at the Devers - very kind and gracious hosts! We've been eating dinner with them a lot and watching good classic movies (like The Saboteur and Christmas in Conneticut).

Yesterday and today we moved all our stuff from the basement at our old house to our new apartment. It is basically a very large studio with a separate little kitchen area. Bobby and I were talking about how amazing Christian community is - one woman at our church is allowing us to use her Suburu Forester yesterday, today and tomorrow to move and run errands. Our friend Brian made two big trips with his truck in the rain. Three other folks came with their cars. Our friends the Dunlaps brought dinner to us (and it was delicious at 8:00 PM after moving in the rain). Such generous, kind folks here at CHBC.

For a slightly more detailed housing situation update: We moved here and stayed in church housing while Bobby was completing the internship. There is a new intern class and another family just moved into our old house. Bobby has been hired to work in the church starting July, so we will be living in our new place through July/August, at which point we will move back to church housing. This situation is made easier by the fact that we live in the basement of a church member's house. They are gracious landlords.

Bobby started his new job yesterday and is loving it so far. At this point he is using a huge master spreadsheet to work through every article and piece of information on the 9Marks website, making comments and brainstorming about which heading it should go under and what other articles it should link to. Once he and the 9Marks crew know what there is, they will know what else needs to be written to round out the information.

I am still dog-walking but adding on to that a job as a teaching assistant at Capitol Hill Learning Group (imagine an informal pre-school and a more structured play-group and you have it!). They run the CHLG out of the top floor of a church on the Hill and work with kids 2-5. They learn Spanish, do arts and crafts, stories, play-time, etc. I'll for now only be working Friday mornings, but it is a great provision for us financially and it will be super fun. I start this Friday and can't wait to meet the little ones in my group.

Some of our prayer requests:

1) Discipline and the fight against laziness. We're trying to get to bed earlier/wake up earlier so we can each have quiet time (Bible reading and prayer) with the Lord before we start our days. We're also trying to become more consistent in our evening family devotions. Pray that our hearts would desire to seek the Lord in these very important ways.
2) Contentment. We've loved living half-way down the block from the church and now we're a mile and a half away. We now live very close to a Metro stop which takes us near the church, so the commute isn't long but...it is a commute. May we be grateful for the kind way God has taken care of us in giving us such a good living situation, albeit further from the church.
3) In light of the new year, all of Psalm 90! It is good for developing an eternal perspective and meditating on God's love. "So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom (vs. 12)."

Take care and much love, friends.

There Will Be More Posts

...starting January 6th or so, when Bobby gets a computer for work and I have my laptop around, and we will have wifi at our new place. Woo-hoo. More thoughts and musings there - all the ones I have pent up! Thoughts on:

• DC bookstores
• Recommended books
• The escalators at Metro Stations (and how they look like Disney's 1960s take on the future...)
• The Inaguration craziness and how all DC residents will have to stock up because the city will be clogged for a week or two with an extra 3 million people or so...
• and more...

Snow!

We had our first snowfall on Saturday! It didn't stick around long, but at least there was a nice dusting. There is more in the forecast for this weekend.

thanks but no thanks, USPS.

I wanted to buy 20 Nutcracker stamps for the Christmas cards I just ordered. Instead of waiting in the very long line at the local post office, I did it online.

So, my whole order is $9.40. Great. After I click submit, they tell me my debit card was denied. Weird. Enter it again, thinking I got it wrong. And twice more (it should work). Now I'm frustrated - I have to go the post office.

Log on to my BofA account to see what's up, and lo and behold, my order went through! Four times! Log back on to the USPS site. No record of order.

Now, do I want to be on the phone with the USPS or my bank? Bank wins, and in five minutes all charges are reversed.

Yay bank. Boo post office.

Dog People

As a dog walker in a swanky place like Capitol Hill, I regularly come into contact with "dog people." I love dogs and can't wait to get one when Bobby and I have the space - but when we do get the pet, it will be a pet. Not an cornerstone of our life.

My clients pay an exorbitant amount to get their pets walked during the day (and sometimes at night, too). There are special instructions and leashes, organic treats, and sometimes sweaters to put on the dogs before their walk (and rain coats too...). It's not that I mind these somewhat over-zealous pet owners, but it means that they have sort of weird dogs. Case in point:

Kiki, the six-pound Italian Greyhound: shivers with fear over anything, needs both sweater and raincoat before allowed to go outside.
Jackson, 130 pound Bernese Mountain Dog: Likes to stop and sniff. Likes to stop and roll on his back (at which point I clear all smaller dogs and children out of the way). Will walk approximately half of a block in 15 minutes if left to his own devices. Oh, and he has a back problem - so I'm not allowed to tug him.
Mortimer, an older Shih-Tzu: Recovering from cancer and pampered. Will stop walking if he decides I'm not letting him sniff enough. Won't walk up stairs (has to be carried).
Lacy and Page, 11 year old King Charles Spaniels: Both 'shriek' uncontrollably when putting on their harnesses (even if they aren't really being hurt).

There are many more but those are the biggest characters. My favorite is Pounce, a exceedingly well-trained (not spoiled!) Jack Russell terrier whose yawn sounds like a small T-Rex. He's awesome.

When I get them all home, I have to write a note about what they did. I'm supposed to include information that shows the owners I "get" their dog, but I'm not supposed to say stuff like, "Today I had to resist the urge to karate chop your dog." Generally I say banal things about the weather and watching squirrels (except on Pounce's notes. I generally am happy to write those!)

New Job

Sadly, my internship at CHBC is quickly drawing to a close. This week we're finishing up some of the books we've been reading all semester. We're attending our last elders' meeting on Thursday night. We've got our second-to-last intern discussion on Thursday morning. We have our goodbye lunch on the twelfth. We're out of the office on the 15th.

All of this is more than a little sad. It would be a lot more sad, however, if not for the work God has granted me to do starting January 5th: writing for 9Marks.

For those of you who don't know, 9Marks is a ministry that runs out of our church whose mission is to help other local churches grow more biblically healthy and so reflect the glory of God. They put out a bi-monthly e-journal, interviews with church leaders, and are working on a series of books. They also do regional workshops for church leaders and host a weekend-long pastors' conference at CHBC three times a year. But what I will be doing is helping to develop content for their new website, which they intend to make into an online pastor training center. Basically I'll be working under Jonathan Leeman, their director of communications, to take material they already have and try to fit it into a more compact, user-friendly, how-to format.

I'm grateful to God for the opportunity to work with men I deeply respect who are doing something I deeply believe in. Please pray that I would be a good steward of this opportunity and that God would use me to help further 9Marks' mission in the few months I have with them, to the glory of God.

Helpful Advice from Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man's treatment was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. 'Why art thou cast down, O my soul?' [Psalm 42] he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: 'Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you'. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have had but little experience.
The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to you soul: 'Why are thou cast down' - what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: 'Hope thou in God' - instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: 'I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God.

- Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, pgs. 20-21