Only in Texas...

... Do you have a man meet you at the door of the grocery store, tell
you he will pick the best/fastest cart there is, wipe the selected
cart off with antibacterial wipes, and then dry it off for us.
Wow. You'd never find that in any other city we've lived in. I was
floored.
If that weren't good enough, once we got in the store, we saw the
scene in the photograph... A tortilla factory right in the middle of
the store. You can't see him in the picture, but there was a guy there
making tortillas. Fresh! We didn't get any today, but don't worry, we
plan on doing so at some point soon.
Only in Texas...

A bit of a different direction...

As some of you know, and many of you don't, we are currently in California so I can work for Apple for the summer. It is a program that is set up so that retail employees who are good at what they do have the opportunity to advance in the company into the corporate environment. Things have been going really well here, and we have loved the experience. The weather is great, there are so many things we haven't seen, there is so much more space than New York, there are less homeless people chasing you on the street for money. Overall, we like it a lot here, and couldn't picture ourselves going back to New York after this.

This is probably why we are not going back to New York at the end of this month. (That isn't entirely true, I will be going back for a few days to get all of our stuff together and coordinate movers in getting our stuff out of storage, out of our apartment, and selling the rest online.) The funny thing is, we won't be staying in California either. About the same time I applied for the position here with Apple, maybe the month before, I had spoken with a guy at a pretty cool church in Dallas about working there to help on their technical team. I have been practicing my sound skills, technical skills and nun-chuck skills at the church we went to in New York, and felt like it was something I wanted to pursue as a career. A couple of weeks ago they offered me a position to work there full time, helping with sound, lights, technical aspects of the church, and training others in "the way of the tech".

Whitney and I prayed a lot about it, because we did not want to rush into anything just because there was something we wanted to do. We did not want to stay in California just because it was the financially smart thing to do. (I don't know if you know this, but Apple makes some pretty awesome stuff, and is a really good company to work for.) We also did not want to run into something where it wouldn't be a good fit, where we didn't believe that we were doing the right thing, and where we didn't feel like we were doing something that would help us grow in Christ. We like the church, we like the people, we feel that the church and my role there will meet us where we are, so we have decided to take things in a different direction than we had originally planned at the start of the summer.

We are super excited to be moving to Dallas. There is so much that needs to be done, but we are confident that everything will go as smoothly as it normally does. Thank you all for any prayers and support you can give us. We definitely appreciate them.