The Guestbook

I can't believe it's November! 2009 will be gone before I know it!

As I was organizing pictures, I thought it would be fun to document all the fabulous visitors we had this year (19 sets in all!). Thanks to all who came!

Here's the guestbook...

.february.

Hope & Jonathan came from Atlanta and climbed at every climbing gym within 300 miles.

.february.
Surprise! Simon and Adriane surprised me by continuing our tradition of spending Valentine's Day together. yay!

.february.

Amy Tabor came to check out Portland and was surprised by the level of coffee snobbery in her tiny cup. :)

.march.
My childhood friend Erin brought her sweet little Illikai for an overnight stay before catching a flight from PDX.

.march.

Our cell groups came to Portland to serve over Spring Break. It was so good to see 'em!

.march.
Saturday Night students from Fellowship also came to serve over their Spring Break. They did great things in Portland!

.march.
The Stadels saw the city and served with students while they were here over Spring Break too.

.april.
My college friend Melodie and her friend Paige came to Portland and took me to the Beth Moore conference. So good to be with Mel and always good to hear from Beth. :)

.june.

After our trip home to NWA, a team from The Life ministry at Fellowship came to serve and pray for Portland. Here they are after helping our friends move into a house in the Alberta neighborhood.

.july.

Our friends Cliff & Nichole visited from Oklahoma City with little Georgia. We love the Hughes!

.july.
RJ & Chelsea seemed to fall in love with Portland right away and are working toward making it home. I like this unassuming picture of them. :)

.august.

Tad, Todd, Andrew & Kyle came through on a west coast road trip. These guys were a good dose of home for us. I think my favorite time was sitting around playing 'guess who this is' based on people's facebook status. Only because we know so many of the same people was it do-able. ha!:)

.august.
Meary! Another college friend who lives overseas came to see us and meet Portland. I laughed more in those days than I had in a long time.

.september.
Taylor, Josh's sister, had also been overseas and had so many great stories and experiences to tell us. The laughs continued with Taylor around. :)

so sweet.

.september.

Josh & Stefanie Lawson included us on their Great Northwest vacation and caught us up on all that's going on at Fellowship, etc. Good times!

.september.

Seester! I was counting down the days to see my sister and show her all my favorite Portland spots. She came to celebrate the big 3-0 with me. and then...

SURPRISE!! The rest of my family showed up at my bday party! I had no idea they were coming!

It was a beautiful weekend and enjoyed it to the full.

.october.

Matt & Martha celebrated their 6th anniversary in Portland, and we soaked up the goodness they brought with them! Precious friends.

.october.
Josh's parents came for a long-awaited visit as well. Ken got to meet one of his favorite celebrities, Matt Roloff of the 'Little People Big World' show. They could have spent a lot more time together if he didn't have to sign autographs.

While they were here we went to the coast at Astoria, OR. Of course we took Hank, as they are quite smitten with their new 'granddog' as Cindy calls him. :) We loved having them here and even more watching people's faces when they heard Ken talk for the first time. hehee.

We are so so so blessed to know and love so many great people!

Thanks for coming to our city!

So, I've been just as inconsistent at blogging as I thought I would be...but that's ok right?

Portland has been really great. God has been even greater.

We are still in the process of carving out life here, but we love living in Portland even more than we thought we would. Some of my favorite things are:

-having things close enough to bike or walk almost everywhere we need to go. (although more than 4 rolls of toilet paper are tough to fit in my bike basket.)

-getting to know our neighbors

-Stumptown coffee

-happy hour (cheap good food!)

-the Portland Spelling Bee on monday nights at a local pizza place

-watching Josh & Duke place on a Kickball team in the Recess Time sports league

It's the little things...

A few ways life is different:

-I have to put my makeup on before I leave the house. (I used to leave that for the 25 minute car ride, and I rarely have that now!)

-i haven't been to wal-mart or starbucks since January, and i'm ok with it.

-people knock on our door, including people Saving the Children, selling tamales, or just saying hi (not a common occurance back in the Tontitown wilderness)

-when i look out my window, someone might be cruising by on bike, skateboard, rollerskates, or unicycle

Take the Tour

our house
(complete with recycling bins out front)

As you enter, you are in an open Living Room/Bar/Dining/Kitchen

Off the dining area, there is a weird little long hallway with a wall of windows.

It is the sun room/office.

extra half bathspare bedroom

our bedroom



master bath (with cool clawfoot tub)

hallway/landing looking out to a small deck out back



utility room in the basement; master shelf builder, Josh

The basement is a big open room, so we've designated corners for various activities.

We may also use it as a gathering place for Lodgepole someday.

music corner
(coming soon...John Mayer and Coldplay concert posters)

library

camping stuff, bikes, etc.The art corner will also be in the basement,

but it's a pile of junk right now, so I'll spare you the picture.

And finally, our back yard

Thanks for taking the tour, friends!

It's a great house. Most of the houses in Portland are old, and have been remodeled. We are the first people to live in this one since it was re-done, so everything is nice and new. Our neighborhood is great - not far from a park, post office, bank and several grocery stores (Safeway and New Seasons which is a great local chain of natural food stores). Pretty weird to have all that in walking distance for us country-dwellers. But we are getting used to it!

Starting Life in Portland

Well, we made it! We arrived in Portland on Saturday, January 10 and met the moving company at the house we had rented sight unseen. (Our teammates, the Revards had checked it out for us when we found it on Craig's List.) Our moving truck driver was a jolly Argentinian man named Cesar. He beat us to the house by a few minutes and called Josh to tell him enthusiastically how great the house was (in his wonderful Argentinian accent of course). "Joesh! It's fanTAStic! You will love it. It's a beaUTiful house!" We thought so too, even though approaching it and trying to think of it as "home" was totally surreal.

Our new friend, Cesar!

Our House!

Our first night in the house was strange, as we grappled with the idea that this would be home, when it felt like we were just staying in another hotel along the way. But, we've come a long way in 2 weeks, and it's starting to feel comfortable at least.

A few days after we arrived, we went to Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast with our teammates to a retreat where we met some other church planters and pastors. The coast in beautiful! We stayed in a place right on the beach in front of the famous Haystack Rock (which apparently appears in the movie The Goonies if you know your 80's history). Highlights of this short trip were some great seafood, a whale sighting, and meeting some really great, passionate people.

Us on the beach in front of Haystack

Haystack Rock at sunset

Our teammates, Duke and Caroline

Upon our return from Cannon Beach, our moms came to visit and help us unpack! They were a huge help. While they were here, our house was transformed from a nest of boxes into the beginnings of a cozy home. (Cozy is a bit of an understatement when we realized how much stuff we had! Ugh!)We didn't make em work the whole time, though. We explored Portland, ate at some of the many unique restaurants and even spent one day snow skiing on the slopes of Mt. Hood! They weather was unusually sunny for all the days they were here, which was awesome.

Since they left to go home, we have continued to work on organizing our house and our life here (Lowe's, Ikea, changing banks, insurance, etc.) and learning about the city of Portland. It is a great place with so many cool things to do, and all kinds of neat people. We are embracing the process of making it home, but it still feels like a long vacation at this point. We've had our twinges of home-sickness as we realize we are here for the long haul. We feel totally up for the challenge, but are realizing that the challenges will be real and require faith and strength.

We've loved the Lodgepole gatherings and getting to know the core-group members. Duke wanted to start this semester by having everyone share their life story/spiritual journey. As we have listened to each one, it's so crazy to see how differently God has worked in each person's life and how "random" it is that we have all found ourselves in the same living room, pursuing Him together (and by "random" I mean not random at all, but mysterious in the purposes of God!). He is doing something, and it's exciting to think about what all it might be. He's pretty cool.

coming next....a virtual tour of our house.

The Wild West

We've

been on the road 4 days a

nd are darn close to our final destination. Kansas and Nebraska were fairly uneventful. Wyoming was so windy we just tried to keep the car on the road. Just this evening we passed into Oregon - we're stopped for the night and will roll into Portland tomorrow aftern

oon!

We stopped over for a day and 2 nights in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. We stayed at a place called Triangle X Ranch where we were the only guests! It's a dude ranch during the summer and a cozy winter wonderland right now. We got to know the staff there, ate great food, and even got to try cross-country skiing for the first time. The Tetons are incredible - like jaggedy pyramids jutting out of the land above the Snake River. Our mini-vacation there was a really good time to slow down and allow a little more reality to sink in as we make this big transition.

Oregon or Bust

So, we set out today on what may be the biggest adventure of our lives. I have waivered between being so excited I want to do a heel click as i jump in the 4 Runner and the other extreme of thinking "what the heck have we done?!" and wanting to turn around and go home. (Surely if you're reading this you know that for the past 9 months we've been preparing to move to Portland, OR after a certain call from the Father to go.)

As Josh and I drove away this morning, our faces were wet with tears all the way into Oklahoma as we realized what we were driving away from. We were getting texts from friends who were thinking of us as we were starting our journey. The tears flowed as we thought about you guys - our family and our "family". I kept thinking, " There are so many people we love back there! Did we treasure enough the time we head with our families? What will it be like not to live where they are available to us all the time? How good is God to give us true friends who love us and have changed us for the better because of who they are? and parents who want the best for us and are willing to sacrifice their desires by encouraging us to go and pursue God's will." what a gift.

The past few days have been a series of goodbyes (like ripping off a hundred bandaids!). The goodbyes have lift me a bit exhausted emotionally, but not becuase I hate them. Of course I didn't look forward to them and put some off until the last possible minute, but even in the betterness there is some sweetness in parting with precious friends and haveing the opportunity to express the value each person and relationship holds. Sweet friends, i hope you know how much you will be missed. Bitter sweet. A few days agao a good friend sent me a Facebook message that said " I've decided not to be sad. I'm choosing just to be very very grateful for the friendship God gave us." I thought that was profoundly mature (especially for a 17 year old girl) and I think I've decided to adopt the same attitude God's gifts are so good, but He is our very great reward, and to take hold of Him, we have to hold the gifts with open hands. He is good, and He'll continue to give us what we need as well as every good gift.

So, it's been a weird day (one anticipated for so long, but surreal now that it's come) and as we watch Nebraska go by, I'm not sure what to think about. It definitely feels like uncharted territory (I've never seen Nebraska to start with...), and I really have no idea what's ahead. When my mind begins to wonder of worry, I feel a deep need to know that God does know whats ahead and that He's going with us. This is going to be an adventure in trust...Here we go!

signing off from Cheyenne, WY,

Laurel

This Summer (2008), we had several incredible opportunities that enabled us to say we went around the world in about 40 days. (ok, it wasn't around the world, but we did do some continent-jumping.)
In June, we went with a team of high school students from Fellowship to Thailand. We stayed in a town on the border of Burma, (aka. Myanmar) and worked with some missionaries there, meeting Burmese and Thai people, and doing a grass-roots level ministry of prayer and evangelism. We saw God do some incredible things that really stretched our faith. We saw people healed from pain and disease with a simple prayer, and watched people hear the news about Jesus and put their belief and trust in Him immediately! God also did amazing things in our students and drew our team together in a neat way. Here are some pics from that time.

more pics and trips to come...