Tickets Purchased!

Alright, so I'm a little jealous. Brian is heading down to Ft. Worth in less than two weeks. I really wanna go too but you know, flights are kinda expensive. The great thing is that we were able to get a flight from Charlotte for a great price! We were checking prices and they all just seemed so high and we were waiting until we got paid to purchase the tickets anyway. Well, on the day we got paid, Brian searched and ta-dah, there was the best deal he had seen! So, he snatched it up. He'll only be gone for 3 days but he will have the opportunity to tour the campus of Southwestern, see the housing where we will be living, attend a worship service, stay for free at their hotel/conference center, and meet with some professors that are in the departments that he will be involved in. When he called to arrange the tour, they wanted to know all about our family and what Brian sees himself doing in the future. They said that they want to know because it helps them plan things for us but also because they already have people praying for us. Isn't that cool? So, after talking to Brian they are going to set up plans for him to meet with some professors from the School of Theology and the School of Evangelism and Missions. He is really excited!


Also, another wonderful provision that I have to share! After booking the flight, Brian started researching rental car options. We never go places where we need a rental car....so we really had no idea what to expect. The last time we used a rental car was for half a day in Hawaii on our honeymoon 7 years ago. As he researched he was finding that prices for a car were going to be close to the same price as a plane ticket!! So, Brian sent out a post on FB to see if anyone had experience with rental cars and could offer some assistance. Well, wouldn't you know that someone would offer some assistance....by offering to take care of all of the cost for a rental!! Seriously, we are so thankful!!


Isn't that incredible?? We're moving right along! Please keep praying that our house would sell quickly and that we could move before the late summer/fall. Thank you!

Why are we moving?

Now that I have posted on facebook about the fact that we need to sell our house because we're moving to Texas I guess I should offer some sort of explanation as to why we are moving to Texas in the first place.

Well we've known for sometime that God was calling us somewhere new. We've actually had a pretty good inkling it was Texas but we weren't exactly sure how or when. Most of you know that ever since Brian resigned from his youth pastor position at our old church, he has had a difficult time finding work. Thankfully, he now has a job but he has not been able to continue his studies at Gordon-Conwell because of the high cost of the classes. He has been continually applying for ministry positions in different places (from Boston to NC to Texas). Sometimes he would get phone interviews and even get in the top 5 but nothing has come through. A few months back he had applied for a job in Spring, Texas. As we were researching the area we starting talking more about how we would like for Brian to be able to go to school full-time so that he can finish up his degree. We knew we were being called toward Texas and for some reason none of the job openings really seemed to fit...even the one he had applied for. So, we started looking into seminaries in Texas. From there we came upon Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. As we watched the opening video on the M.Div page, it was as though the person in the video had heard our conversation and our situation. He asked, "Are you being called to move?" As we listened to the video, even pausing it once to look at each other in surprise, we heard about how the Master of Divinity program there has a church planting track and a Hispanic ministry track: 2 things that we have felt called to. We heard about on campus housing options for families and other things that we had been talking about.

Our next step was to research teaching options for me in Ft. Worth. As we started looking into it we found that they have a need for bilingual teachers and even offer a sign on bonus and stipend to them. We found that the starting pay for a teacher in Texas is ridiculously nice compared to my teacher's salary in NC. We would actually be able to pay for Brian to go to school full-time! That is something that we could never afford here. So, we are getting ready to mail my license and transcripts to Ft. Worth so I can get a provisional Texas teacher's license and then hopefully get a job for the fall.

So, after we saw those big answers to much prayer seeming to come together, Brian applied to the school. It took a while to get his transcripts and everything but he was officially accepted into the M.Div program for the fall at Southwestern on Monday.

We are hoping to be able to move out there during the summer so now we are working on selling our house. We have started lots of projects to make our house more "sell-able" and we would appreciate your prayers for it to sell!

We also wanted to share that we are still continuing with our plans to adopt. Nothing has changed with that. Our agency works with cooperating agencies in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. We will have an addendum done for our homestudy to update our new information once we get there. It will not cost as much as the original homestudy. We will also have to update our USCIS information eventually but that is actually free for your first update. We still don't have any idea about the time line of when we would receive a referral but we are trusting God with all of the details. We want to be obedient to what and where He is calling us to. He has always been faithful and trustworthy so we are confident that He will continue to be.

Dallas

Accepted!

That's the news for today! Brian's last transcript finally arrived today AND Southwestern sent him an e-mail saying that he was accepted into the Master of Divinity program for the fall!!!!!! Isn't that great news?! We are SUPER excited! The next two big steps are to sell our house and for me to find a job/get my teaching license in Texas. We are working on both of those things now! I'll write some more details tomorrow!

The transcript arrived!

Guess what? Brian's transcript from Gordon-Conwell finally arrived at Southwestern today! We can stop obsessively checking the website for it now! Wait no we can't....now we will check to see if he has been accepted! On the website it says to allow 7-10 business days to hear whether he was accepted or not. If he gets accepted, we are hoping to use tax money if we get some and some money from side work that Brian is doing to pay for a ticket for him to fly out there and tour the campus. They will provide lodging for 2 nights and food for 1 day on campus. He would fly in on probably a Sunday and do the tour on Monday and then fly back on Tuesday. The tour would start at 9am and he would see the academic buildings. He would have lunch with the professors from the M.Div department. Then he would tour any remaining buildings in the afternoon and he would get to see the on campus housing. Dinner would be in the cafeteria.

So, we keep seeing Texas over and over again. We hear it in conversations and randomly meet people from there. We have seen it on random t-shirts, license plates, games at my school (weird), lone flags flying in front of businesses.

On the way to church on Sunday, we drove the same way we always drive and as I was looking out the window to the left, all I could see was the Texas flag up on a hill outside of a business. They had other flags too because I could see their poles but I couldn't see any of the other flags. Crazy huh? :)

No news but a fun God moment!

Well, we still don't have any news about Brian's application status and whether or not he has been accepted. We have been waiting for Gordon-Conwell to send his trancript and they made a mistake and didn't send it out within 1-2 days even though we paid extra for that. When Brian spoke with them they said they would try to mail it yesterday. As of today, it has not been received by Southwestern. So, we are really hoping that NEXT WEEK we will know SOMETHING! It is soo stressful to just wait and wait on everything in our lives. While we wait we are trying to be productive in getting our house ready to sell though. This week we have been really busy with work though and haven't gotten as much accomplished but we're hoping to use this weekend to do some more work and start painting the kitchen cabinets.

I don't think I shared about last weekend though! Well, last weekend we went to our friends' little boy's birthday party at their house. It's sorta complicated but another couple came that we are friends with too. They brought one of their new friends that was staying with them for the week. While we were all talking I found out that she is from Texas and lives about 15 minutes from Ft. Worth. She told us that she has many friends that go to Southwestern and even knows a couple that has a little boy and lives on campus like we hope to do. Also, a few weeks ago Brian and I had been talking about how we'd love to find a Reformed Baptist chuch but ya know, there really aren't many of those churches around here and we assumed there probably aren't in Texas either. So, my new friend started telling me that she and her family go to a Reformed Baptist church in Texas! Isn't that funny? We had seriously just been talking about that at home and then she shared that they go to one. Anyway, we thought it was so cool that God would bring us together to talk about Ft. Worth and Southwestern at a place we never expected!

We still haven't heard...

We thought we were gonna find out a couple weeks ago if Brian was accepted or not. We actually found out that his transcripts weren't sent so he has requested that they be sent and now we just wait. Brian got a call from Southwestern just to check in with him. They were super nice and helpful. We are trying to figure out a way for at least him to go out there. They will cover lodging and food if we can buy the plane ticket. I'd love to go too but I'm pretty sure we can't afford that either unless we get an amazing tax return or something. I guess we'll see what happens. We're still in the waiting phase but while we wait we are still working on fixing up our house to sell it.

So far we (mostly Brian) have:

1. Removed the metal shower doors, bought a new curtain and rod and hung them up.
2. Sanded and specially primed all the cabinets in the kitchen.
3. Removed the wallpaper border that has apparently been up in our kitchen for 20 years.
4. Re-organized the bookshelf in our living room so it doesn't look like such a mess.
5. Stayed well long enough to do all that. :)