Needs

Blogs are funny thing because they can become soapboxes by which to profess our frail and often shortsighted opinions. Or they can be used to bless people. It is always my hope that this will bless. What I've found though is for that to happen truthfulness, straightforwardness, and honesty are the catalysts that tend to bless in the later case. By simply telling what is going on in our lives how we are coping in it and who we are clinging to in it. This can provide a depth of insight that gives blogging its purpose and blessing in this strange world we inhabit.

With that in mind in being honest and straightforward, this is going to be a longer that normal one: the issue I am going to try and tackle is less a blog and more a summary of the past 3 years or so... So I will try to highlight important parts only...

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My last year of college, I paid my way through. I was engaged to a beautiful and wonderful woman. And in that first year in a sense of being financially on my own I began and saw what I wanted my life to look like. What I deemed as important. And in that I began praying for where the Lord might send my future wife and I together as we began our lives together after college. And the Lord started planting this crazy idea of moving to NYC. And the idea stuck...and hasn't gone away.

I saw the detriment of what a long car commute can do to a marriage and didn't want any part of that in mine I wanted public transportation options where I could use the transit time productively. I knew the realities of architecture and that when I do get a full time job in it it would occupy a majority of my time. I saw what suburban living did to further divide an already splintered world and frankly didn't want any part of it. I wanted a diversity of people poverty and wealth in my face day in and day out. I didn't want to ignore it by doing the garage freeway office freeway garage option.

And in looking back God started laying a ground work long before I even began considering NYC : this jump to the other side of the country:

See, I have never had an architecture job and God seems to have bitterly opposed it up to this point. I have done design-build construction but never worked in an architecture office, because frankly God didn't want me to for I imagine the NYC reason. Most people would agree with me in this statement that if a firm were to have me intern with them they would have offered me a full time job and I would have accepted and that would not have been in NYC. So instead God for whatever reason during the years I could have interned or chose to try to get a job as an intern orchestrated the biggest financial collapse and worst architectural hiring crisis since the profession began in the late 1800s. I instead during the past two summers designed and built a 2200 sf "house" for Elise and I to survive one of the most crazy winters on record for a lot of the country in a rather warm Colorado while working two management positions on my end and several graphic design jobs on my wife's end to save enough money to have us line up with this movement of God.

But it hasn't been all about saving because we really have has a year off from the craziness that is the working world reality. We have been able to bless our family. I have been able to serve my wife in ways I couldn't as an architecture student who also worked part time and had a social life and it has been a joy. We have been able to help out my brother in law who tore his ACL and LCL in a skiing accident and just bought a fixer-upper which he can't do certain things due to his accident working, physical therapy, and being the youth director at the church etc.. and me with all my design build knowledge can help out... . We were able to spend time with and see off my other brother in law who recently moved to Florida. We became part of the respective in-laws family and now know how to fit in quite comfortably.

And now that the world is on its way to recovery and we feel a great need to get our lives started for our own sanity we are going to step into what we have felt God orchestrating for a long while. I'm sure it won't pan out exactly like we think but God is still most certainly in it.

So in light of that and many other things and what we feel and see the Spirit doing Elise and I have decided to move sometime in July to NYC. We have planned a housing trip to NYC June 22nd-28th which will hopefully be enough time to secure an apartment. We will be celebrating our one year anniversary on the 27th there and beginning our journey shortly after!

Pray for us to both secure jobs or to have enough coming in to survive so hopefully we do not run out of savings in the most expensive city in the world. I have a firm that is interested in me and is very likely to hire me on a contract basis if enough work comes in, pray for that. Pray for my wife's job prospects. She is wicked talented and has many contacts she will meet with when we move. Excited for what God has for us there that week and beyond! and the six weeks we will be in Colorado two weeks in California before that!

JG