April Already?

As I looked at the calendar this morning I could hardly believe that it’s already April. These past few months have gone by in a blur. A few weeks ago I ended my job at Starbucks and took one as a nanny for a local family. I’m learning quickly that nannying has its own challenges, but I’m very grateful to be working normal hours. I was interested in this particular job because the family is raising their children to be bilingual, and they wanted a nanny who would be willing to immerse their kids in Spanish. Each day I’m amazed at how much the kids (2 and 4) already understand, and little by little they are beginning to speak the language too. It’s been a good challenge for me to speak Spanish all day long, although I didn’t realize how much vocabulary I’ve forgotten!

Tim’s still at Blue Nile, doing customer service for them, and slowly – oh so slowly – they’ve begun giving him less 4am shifts. I still feel like we live in a sort of time warp though, when we look at the clock that says 8pm and we know we should’ve already been in bed. We keep reminding ourselves, “We’ll have stories for the kids one day…”

As we approach this summer, many of our conversations have revolved around our photography business and trying to determine what that is going to become. We’re both thrilled for the coming months and all the weddings that we get to shoot together. It means we get to see friends and to travel, but I also think it’ll really help us to discover what our style is and how we work together. Down the road we see ourselves working alongside one another, in ministry, in a photo business, through counseling, or in some combination of the three. It’s so easy to want to skip ahead to whatever that is. I daily have to remind myself that there is value in what we’re doing now, that we’re learning and growing through the circumstances that we’re in right now. I recently re-listened to a chapel message from our senior year at Wheaton. Sarah Graham suggested Tim and I listen this message by Dr Burge a few months ago, but the words struck me harder as I listened to it again last week.

“God is at work shaping us with indelible experiences when we don’t even realize it…And what I’ve decided is that there’s a tremendous denial at the very heart of that kind of thinking. The denial says that what we are doing right now, what we are experiencing right now, who we know…these are accidents we think. And it’s wrong. God is at work shaping us now in the experiences that come our way and we don’t even realize it.”

I’m clinging to this thought, so as not to be swept away by my own frustration and desire for something different for us.

Tim and I drove over to the University of Washington to see the cherry blossoms last weekend, and they were just as spectacular as promised. Spring is blooming here in Seattle, but the cloudy gray skies refuse to loosen their grip. I've been told summer here is spectacular...I'm so ready for it.