The Wonder Years..

What a crazy time for us. We come out of kettles and enter this huge planning season where we are launching new ministries, and also enter the third trimester of our pregnancy. We are now down to four weeks and one day until the baby comes. I'm now working 40 hours a week, and coming home and trying to muster enough strength to gut out some rooms to make clean suitable rooms for our family to live in before the baby comes. Yesterday, Dave Johnson one of our neighbors came over for a few hours to help. Dave really knows houses and so we walked through the house and discussed its potential and things to change. Now I can finally wrap my head around this project and get more work done.

I was thinking about our neighborhood during this, and how cool it is that we have some good friends in this neighborhood. That we all look out for each other, that we can eat meals together, or hang out, and it all feels so natural. This wasn't the case in our old neighborhood. I knew my next door neighbors, but people were still pretty private. If I needed a jump or another person to help troubleshoot a car problem, I know I could ask one neighbor, but other than that we were all strangers. I felt even more isolated when I lived with my parents. I didn't know many of our neighbors, and while everyone was very friendly, there was no real relationship there. I was blessed to live in a awesome neighborhood from age 5-14 that was full of kids and families, complete with woods, tree forts, skateboard ramps, open fields for football and soccer and baseball, and more. I think this helped me to learn what community is, and how much we need each other. I used to watch the TV show "The Wonder Years" and think, wow that was such a different time. But I always knew that we had the same kind of community in our neighborhood as they did in The Wonder Years.

So, I am happy to live in the Grand Traverse Neighborhood because it is similar to the neighborhood of my childhood. There are so many of us who are friends, who will sit on the porch and talk, who will stop by for small talk, who will help when and however they can. We need to have good relationships in this neighborhood so we can support each other in our efforts to combat the problems in the neighborhood. We also can celebrate the good things going on in our lives and in the neighborhood together.

I used to think that I too would eventually end up out in the suburbs, but I am not so sure about that. I love this neighborhood, this city, and I love being in the midst of its renewal, its restoration, its rebuilding.