Update on Our Adventure

Update: Half Way

Amber and I have lived in Liberty Community for five months now. In five more months, we will move to Springfield, MO for graduate school.

We love it here in Liberty, and our hearts are sad about the prospect of moving again. We are having such a good time, building so many wonderful friendships, and learning so much about life in community. (To read more about our recent adventures in Liberty, MO, follow the link above. We have been posting there lately instead of here.)

We are excited about graduate school, too. We are presently applying for scholarships and assistantships. (Fingers crossed that the application process goes well!) I will be studying communication and Amber will be studying literacy education.

More about Springfield later. It is one of my and Amber’s goals to live in the present as much as possible. We want to soak up all that is going on around us. And, while we plan for the future, we do not want to be preoccupied by it.

We have a community planning meeting coming up this Sunday. We will be planning a weekend retreat, our spring garden and chicken coop, a possible trip to Texas to work with Points on the Wheel, weekend house-project-work-days, and more!

So, as you can see, there is a lot going on here in Liberty, just the way we like it. Amber and I are excited about all that the fun that await in the weeks and months ahead.

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Concise Update

Hi all. Just a quick update. We had a community meeting yesterday to talk about what next year (August) will look like. Amber and I will shove off to Liberty, MO. But Scott, Kari, Ryan, Jenn, Dave and Karen will all be in Pittsburgh again next year.

This year has been about learning the nuts and bolts and best practices for intentional community. You might say that learning nuts and bolts has been our focus.

The consensus is that next year can have a new focus. We want to take what we have learned this year and apply it in a new way to next year. So the question at hand is: What should our new focus be? Hospitality? Prayer? Gardening?

While the six are thinking about what their life together in Pittsburgh will look like next year, Amber and I are looking forward to life in Liberty and pondering same questions.

More to come!

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Our New Home In Pictures

Please enjoy touring our beautiful new home. Please note that we did not clean the house for this tour, so it is entirely as is – as if you came to see it for yourself. 🙂  If you are interested in seeing us in real life or in sending us delightful care packages filled with your love, let us know!

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Home Is Wherever I’m With You

Hello friends! We are so sorry for the lack of posting of late. I found this post below that was saved but never posted. It’s about two weeks late, but here you go!! I will write another one today that includes pictures! Love to all. Thanks for joining us on this journey!

After four packed U-Haul loads, 5 full mini vans and a few car trips, we have moved. Basically what that looks like is that all of our stuff is out of our old place and inside of the new house. Some things are precariously balanced on top of other items in order to make space for a walkway while we wait to move furniture into a few unfinished rooms. It is not necessarily unpacked or organized or arranged, but it is there. And that, friends, is no small thing. We worked for two days solid moving boxes, books, furniture, shelves, clothes, suitcases, food, cleaning supplies, books, shelves, shoes, more shelves and more books. Last weekend was a bit of a blur of eight people’s belongings being shuffled around in this crazy flurry of activity.

Joyfully, our room is set up. There is so much floor space that I can now do yoga inside the room without hitting anything. We also have a fully functioning kitchen that we have made several meals in. Oh, and get this – we can actually prepare the meal inside the kitchen instead of in the dining room. I fixed dinner yesterday and it was wonderful. Did I mention that our entire basement is going to be a library that has 60 shelves? Yes, 60 shelves of books.

Moving tends to bring out either the best or the worst in people. Fortunately, it brought out more of the former in our group. Please don’t think we are super holy and perfect, because there was plenty of the worst of people shining through at times. But, there was so much grace and love shown this past weekend, and it made me realize how great this group is. Just when one person thought they couldn’t go up another step, someone tells them they are doing a great job. When I thought I was able to carry something and ended up almost dropping it, someone was there to catch it and help. I realize how silly and cliche all of that sounds, but we truly did work as a team. Reason number 390 community is a beautiful way to live.

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Where are We?

Perhaps there are some of you devout followers of our blog that are wondering if we were abducted by aliens or fell into a magic spell that made blogging impossible or maybe we suffered the same fate as the unicorns. Well, thankfully none of these situations have happened to us. The truth is – we are moving! While moving does not typically cause feelings of joy and excitement in most people, it does for us for the following reasons:

• Togetherness! All eight of us (plus Max!) will be able to live together in the same house rather than two apartments and a guest room nearby. All of us had the desire to do this when we made the move across the country to Pittsburgh. We rejoice that we will be able to truly share life now as we continue our journey in community.
• Space! Currently, we occupy one two bedroom apartment, one single bedroom apartment and one guest room at a nearby house. We have been making this work joyfully since August. Eight people is a lot to pack into this small amount of shared space. When we have guests, we have to eat in our living area because our dining area is so small. In the new house, we have SO MUCH SPACE! There are a total of 3 full kitchens, 3 bathrooms with bathtubs, 6 bedrooms, two dining rooms, two huge living rooms, two covered porches (one on the second floor!), and a full basement to store stuff in! We can have company and have room to share with them! We will be able to all eat at one table comfortably! We will be able to have personal space! We will be able to have more than one person in the kitchen at one time! Oh how this all fills my heart with joy!
• Max! Our current space is not pet-friendly according to our lease, so Max has not been a very big part of our life. Now, Max will be able to live in the new house with us! Max is such a great dog, and I am excited to have him as a bigger part of our community. He brings a sense of calm with him and is just great to have around. Our bedroom will be adjacent to where he will sleep and that just makes me happy. 🙂

As you can see, there are many reasons to rejoice in this move that will happen next weekend. However, before the move happens, there is a lot of work to do first! We are refinishing the wood floors in the house and have 3 more rooms to do before tomorrow night. We would also like to paint our bedroom. Cleaning of two kitchens, one bathroom and the stairwell has not happened yet either, so those are a must. Oh, and we have to pack.

We had a workday with a bunch of friends at the house yesterday in which so many good things took place that we are excited about. We built a raised garden bed, pulled up ivy on the side of the house, took up the finish on the floors downstairs, cleaned and unpacked the whole kitchen in the basement, cleaned the bathrooms, painted the garage door and moved some of our stuff from storage into the basement. 17 sweet people came to help the 8 of us, so there were 25 people all working on various projects, including a few awesome youth from our church. We are so grateful for all of the work that happened yesterday. There is still a lot to do, but we are excited to get into this new space on Saturday. So, please be gracious with our lack of blogging as we are working hard at creating a community space at the new house. We will update with pictures and everything soon!

How, you ask is our community handling all of these changes and high stress levels? With beautiful grace, gentleness and love I would say. It is difficult to stay positive and not become super overwhelmed by all of this; but, I see all of us pulling together so much to work on the house, fix meals, and get things packed up. It is beautiful how our communication and needs-sharing has happened. I know I tend to become irritable and not very patient with Jay sometimes in these situations, but seeing how others are interacting and turning towards one another right now really challenges me and sharpens me to do the same. These 7 people that I live with are acting as the iron that is sharpening me daily into a more accurate depiction of what love looks like in this broken world.

Please pray for us as we have a stressful week ahead of us with moving and getting the house ready. May we show each other the grace that God shows us daily.

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What Have You Been Doing Lately?

We’ve had a lot of fun experiences over the past week or so. I wanted to highlight a few of them.

A Fair in the Park

We went to A Fair in the Park, which was held at Mellon Park, 16 beautiful acres within walking distance from our apartments. (Some of us have unofficially, affectionately dubbed our apartments “The Ranch.”)

The Fair featured fine arts and crafts made by the Craftsmen’s Guild of Pittsburgh. I was particularly impressed by all the pottery that was available. (It was a lot like Springfield’s ArtsFest, if you’re familiar with that.)

Taizé

We also went to Taizé prayer at East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

East Liberty is a truly magnificent building, built in the style of the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. When the architect was hired by the Mellons to build the current East Liberty Presbyterian Church building in 1935, he was given “absolute freedom to build the finest and most beautiful church to the glory of God that he could create.” In his own words (from the Presbyterian Banner, May 23, 1935), “Of all the cathedrals and churches I have built this is my masterpiece. This church has been the most profound spiritual experience of my life.”

Taizé prayer is a form of prayer that is centered around singing. It is held in the chapel with the red curtains shown above. Taizé prayer is named after Taizé France, and the praying community that formed there in 1940. Click here to listen the the kind of songs typically sung in Taizé.

Ceramics!

Above is a picture of the ceramics studio where I (Jay) get to hang out every Saturday from 2:30 to 4. This huge ceramics studio is housed in the basement of Braddock Carnegie Library, where I am a full time AmeriCorps member. Therefore I get to not only throw my own pots but also teach youngsters how to throw as well.

Operation Better Block

Amber has also been enjoying her AmeriCorps placement, Operation Better Block. She and I both recently participated in an event that the organization held called the Homewood Childrens’ Village, designed to help connect children and parents to the community resources that can help them toward their goals.

It’s been a fun couple of weeks. We’re really enjoying our time here!

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Settling In

We have been in Pittsburgh for 10  days now and it has been a whirl wind adventure! In our last post we wrote about all the exciting things going on. We both decided to move forward with the Americorps option for the year. Jay is working the rest of the week at Baskin Robbins and a few nights next week, then he is all done with that. I work tomorrow and Friday at the preschool just to fill in because everyone is taking off this weekend, then I am done with that. We start Americorps training on Monday. They have a game night scheduled for all the Corps members on Friday which we might attend in order to meet everyone prior to training. Currently, neither of us have Americorps site placements set in stone, but we are interviewing this week. Jay had an interview today that went well and he has two tomorrow. I have had two interviews with one offer at a YMCA coordinating an afterschool program. I am hoping to interview with the science center here for a really great program that they do that partners with Pittsburgh High Schools, but I haven’t yet heard back from them. We will see where this journey leads.

As far as community goes, everyone is settling in. All of our schedules right now are erratic, so it is difficult to develop rhythms of life together right now, but that is going to change soon as we all start our jobs and such. We are developing chore lists and cooking rotations. There are so many small things about community life that would be easily overlooked. Ryan mentioned this the other night at prayer and he is so right. We really take for granted the background preparation that must be done in order to make this work successfully.

We are praying nightly at 9:00, and I am so grateful that we have started this rhythm. We are all aware of the fact that it would be easy to go through the whole year just doing life and forgetting about the spiritual formation that should be happening. After we all start our job placements, we are going to begin the curriculum that was planned for Formation House.

It’s all so exciting to be here and be a part of this adventure. Many of you have asked us to show pictures of our living spaces. That you have to look forward to! We will take some pictures of our common spaces and share what happens in them with you in the coming posts.

By the way, trees are starting to change here in PA. I have even stepped on some crunchy leaves. All too soon!

Love to all.

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And… Action!

checklist:

• Place to live, check
• furniture, check
• jobs, check

Update: We have moved successfully. I feel like we’ve accomplished a lot in just a few short days. And while community is very much still in the formation stages here, we are excited about what this year holds for us.

Amber and I and Karen and Dave are all here. We’ve been living for the past few days in a two-bedroom apartment along with Karen and Dave. It is our understanding that Jen and Ryan will be here pretty soon (driving in from Texas), at which time the one-bedroom apartment, which is literally right next to the two-bedroom, will be ready to move into. That means: three different couples, three different rooms close together, and various common spaces. We also look forward to meeting Scott and Kari when all the necessary pieces fall into place for them.

We hope to have a group picture soon, and/or maybe some short bios of each of us so that you can get to know the people we are journeying with this year.

I start work at Baskin-Robbins tomorrow. I may look for another job in the future, I’m undecided about that, but it’s great for now just to have a job. Amber starts at a preschool Thursday called Creative Play.

It is about time for Tuesday Night Dinner, so I will sign off for now. Feel free to contact Amber or I at any time; via phone, electronic, or (our favorite) snail mail!

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