Showing posts with label transition. Show all posts

I'm so excited for my new job to start. I officially have been offered a position as a housing support worker for 16-25 year olds in my town. This is the exact job that I wanted and I am really so so so excited to get started.

I think what excites me most is that I went in for a visit the other day and got to meet some of the staff and kids. Not only were they lovely, but they started telling me how they are really hoping to have a season of starting some really new and exciting events for everyone to get involved in.

They told me how one of the big reasons they wanted me to join their team was to help them initiate some new ideas and projects for the young people. I got to sit and chat about starting things like movie clubs, book clubs, table tennis tournies, bake offs, days out, football clubs and so many other awesome things.

Then I got my job contract in the mail and again as I was reading over my job description I started getting goose-bumpy at the points where it said some of my job will be helping the young people get involved in the community! *big cheesy smile from ear to ear!*

Over the next two weeks I have just scheduled loads of time off from my normal week of running around like a mad person. I purposefully have made myself as free as possible to hopefully have time to spend with my friends and family before the insanity of this job kicks off! As much as I am going to love working full-time again it also is going to cut into how much time I have to just be around my neighborhood and friends.

I've gotten so used to having lots of time for the people I live around I am nervous that it will be harder and harder to get to know my neighbors, but I'm still hoping that the longer steve and I live around here the more chances we will have to see the neighbors and friends we have on this estate working together to know each other and be the awesome people I have come to know and love!

Our estate is such an awesome place and it is with slight sadness that I move my main focus from getting to hang out with people there to this new job, but I know God is in control of this and even though it leaves a lot of unanswered questions... The biggest one being *How do I help lead a Christ-centred community when my focus is now going to be so divided between work and my local community?... I must trust that God is going to work things out.

There is so much good happening on our Estate. I feel this is a season of things multiplying, but we are still on the edge and that multiplication hasn't happened yet. So it take a a large dose of hope and trust, but I like knowing it is not by my power or might that good happens in this world, but through the awesome character of our creator Father that all things work together for good!

Needless to say its been busy. save spending a million characters explaining all that has happened to me sense July I will just say that I've successfully relocated to the UK and gotten married... and married life rocks!!!

Steve (my new hubby) and I have joined a prayer community here called Colchester Boiler Room. After our wedding I've pretty much just slowly eased myself into the Colchester or 'Chester-ville' (as I like to call it) lifestyle.

The hardest part of this transition has been the slowing down. There is something about being in community that slows you down about 100%. All of the sudden my skills that got me through days of working full-time, being in graduate school full time, volunteering with my church leadership team, helping organize a local community, and being engaged/planning an international wedding... just didn't seem to matter.

It's as if the people here function by a different code of survival. And man do they utilize the spiritual gift of lingering. By the end of my first week I was so frustrated with how little was accomplished each day that I just sunk into an attitude of reclusion. I figured if going out was going to result in so little being accomplished then I might as well stay in.

That didn't help matters either.

Days seem so long. Nights even longer.

Who knew facebook had an actual limit to how much time I could spend on there??

So after I refreshed my facebook and twitter pages for the millionth time I decided maybe trying things a different way might be better.

So I woke up one morning and did something I haven't done in ages... I only put two things into my diary for the day.

1. Go visit Colchester Boiler Room

2. Read Red Moon Rising

My day was amazing. I had time for people. Suddenly I was hearing peoples stories. I was able to settling into the life that was around me AND ENJOY IT! That odd guilt sensation of feeling rushed or that I had to get to my next meeting was gone and there was just this comfortable sense of being.

I was reminded of this book I had read "Radical Hospitality" by this Benedictine monk. He had reminded his audience that living a lifestyle of simplicity didn't just mean wearing a straw hat, carrying a pitch-fork, and making lots of bread... but it also meant simplifying your life schedule by actually scheduling in space for nothing.

In just the last couple of weeks those spaces of nothing have been the times that I have most genuinely experience the community and relationships I so long for. All the sudden I'm wondering, What if while I live here I make it my goal to do more nothing?

haha as a good friend sat on couch in my brand-new honeymooning flat and said "Remember Tina, its quality not quantity".... my newly married, newly communal, and newly Chester-ville self would have to agree! wink wink....