Urban Idealist

I was talking with a guy last night over dinner and the inevitable question came up, “So, what are you guys going to be doing?” We’ve gotten this question a lot lately…and with good reason because we have lots of people in our lives that care about us and want to know.  

But as we were talking I realized that at this time in our lives we are actually living in three different worlds that each present their own unique challenges to process. We are still trying to process our past few years. We learned a lot of lessons in round 1 of living in Europe. We learned the type of lessons that one can only learn through hard life-experience. And these lessons take a while to take root and to be lived out in a healthy way, not out of the pain that actually caused the lesson to be learned. It may sound a bit dramatic, but it is hard work that doesn’t show up on the outside right away! We are so thankful for the present time we have to work on this.  

And the present presents its own challenges. Right now we are trying to figure out what we will be tangibly doing over the next year. We are still trying to get somewhat settled after half a year of traveling and living out of suitcases! We are looking forward to sinking our lives into something while we are here in Portland.

And then there’s the future. This seems to be the one that everybody is so curious about…including us. (Why do we get so concerned with the future?) The future has it’s enormous challenges because it’s influenced by the past and the present. We have ideas about what we want the future to hold, yet at the same time we don’t want to play God and pretend we know exactly what is going to happen. Thus making the question hard to answer.

One of the most important things in our lives right now is to be surrounded with people who see the importance of the past and the present in our future and give us freedom to be whole people and deal with all aspects of our lives at this time. I can’t say enough how much I believe that we are right where we need to be right now.  

The one common theme in all aspects of our lives’ time continuum is that we have hope in them all. Hope that our past is being redeemed. That God is living with us in the present encouraging us on. And that our future will be full of ways give ourselves away for God’s redemptive work.