Revelation 12:11: I miss the darkness...

Hi everyone!

After some prompting from some friends and a little procrastinating, I am finally sitting down to fill you all in on our first week in Anchorage!

We arrived on Sunday, July 17^th, a really rainy, cold day. Little did we know, that’s pretty typical for Alaska summer weather! I have only worn my shorts and sandals once in the past 9 days, and that was being pretty brave. The temperature stays pretty much around 55-65. All of this will be much more tolerable when we receive our household goods and all of our clothes and I have more options to layer in. Right now, the same three pairs of jeans are getting worn over, and over, and over again. Maybe I should just go shopping!

Anyways, we moved in to our new house last Thursday. This house is really nice. It’s a newer unit, with three bedrooms upstairs, a living room, dining room, and extra room in the front that we’ll make my office/piano room. We have a one-car garage, but a double wide driveway that can easily park four cars in it. Much different than our miniature mountain we had to park on in Bellevue! The only drawback was that the carpet smelled horrible from whatever pets the previous owners had in here. At least, we’re hoping it was just pets and not that actual people… So we complained to the housing office and they replaced our carpet through the entire house the very next day! We were very impressed with how quickly they took care of things.

We’ve been warmly welcomed by so many people, too. Last week two families from Jordan’s band at work had us over for dinner, and the pastor I’ll be working with had us over for lunch on Sunday. I know lots of you are wondering what my new job will look like up here, so I’ll fill you in the best I can at this point.

I have been hired by an organization called Covenant Youth of Alaska (CYAK) to work at First Covenant Church in Anchorage with the youth programs. I’ll mostly be working with high school and college students. So far what that looks like is running youth nights on Wednesdays with other CYAK staff, working closely with Pastor Phil (the youth pastor at FCC), and raising funds to support my ministry and scholarship students to go to camp. Speaking of camp, I’ll be hopping on a puddle-jumper plane next Tuesday to head off to the “bush” as they call it up here. I’ll be spending 5 nights in a village north of here with other CYAK staff and college students! I am really excited to meet other CYAKers and my directors, plus get in a little fishing and berry picking! I’ll definitely let you know how that goes, but please keep me in your prayers as I’m a little nervous to fly on the small plane to a place I’ve never been with people I’ve never met!

Jordan is doing great with his new job up here. The band had him working right away, and they played for the Governor’s Picnic on Saturday. Jordan is playing bass in the jazz band and also a small rock band that comes out of people in the jazz band. So far, so good… just really busy. He’ll be gigging lots over the next few weeks, and then he’ll be going to Japan for two weeks to tour over there! I was supposed to go with him to see our dear Schmice friends and their new baby, but I’ll actually be going at a later time when things have settled down. I can’t wait to see them!

Our household things have arrived in AK, so we’re just waiting for them to be delivered, hopefully soon. I’ll post lots of pictures once we get our things moved in. For now, we just have some temporary furniture to get us by for a few days. We are so grateful to our friends Clint and Sandra for lending us their bigger airbed and for helping me make black-out curtains for our bedrooms! What would we do without you here to show us the ways? J They also took us on a beautiful hike last week to some glacial waterfalls. It was so cool, literally. The air temp drops like 10 degrees when you get close to the water! I have a couple pics of that night.

Thanks for hanging out with us on this blog.. we really love you all!