December

So I guess I haven't updated this thing in a while. It seems like the only time I get around to doing this is right after our student leadership meetings, and since we haven't had one in about a month, this hasn't been updated in about a month. Oh well.

Laura and I just got back from a week away visiting families and such. We leave again on Sunday for ten days in Colorado, and then after five days back in Boston we leave again for Christmas with Laura's folks. I'm kind of looking forward to just being at home for an extended period of time.

We've decided that we're going to remain in Boston for another year, which means two things. First, we've decided that since we'll be in our apartment past May of this year, we're going to paint. I'm really excited to pick paint colors and make the apartment look a little nicer. Second, since we're somewhat more stable, we've decided to get a puppy. Laura's been wanting a pet for a while now, but we didn't want to get a pet only to have to travel with it across the entire country if we were going to grad school in California. We want to get a medium sized dog. I really want to get a girl dog and name it Buffy :) But we'll see how it turns out. We still need to get permission from our landlords, so we're hoping they'll be amenable to the idea.

I think I'm finally done grieving grad school for this year. When we first made the decision to stay, I was pretty sad for the next few days. By spending time in prayer and with our students, though, I feel confident in our decision to stay. Laura and I really love the relationships we've built here, and since we really are in a position of being able to help out for another year, we felt it would be incredibly selfish of us to not hold off another year before applying. After all, we're both young, and waiting another year really won't derail our life plans too much (hopefully). I'm still really excited about the idea of going back to school, and I really think that's the general direction Laura and I will be headed in sooner or later.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I finally finished listening to Tim Keller's marriage series. It really confirmed my conviction that I've married just about the best person ever for me. It was so encouraging and affirming to hear Tim talk about all these necessary elements of a good marriage and to be able to look back and see a lot of those things already present in our relationship. I know that we're going to have our issues and problems just like any other couple, but in so many ways I feel like Laura and I really, really knew what we were getting ourselves into and I think that our time at NYU really, really prepared us for marriage. By working through so much of our crap in such an amazing, truth and grace filled community, we really are inflicting a lot less pain on each other. I feel like we came to a much deeper understanding of ourselves and how we relate to others and how the gospel affects literally every aspect of our lives, and this has been so helpful in our marriage. I'm so excited for more of the old NYU crew to get hitched!

Anyways, I really do have a lot of work to do. I think I'll wrap this up and get back to filtering through our contact list. Ugh.