An update on life per ye blog times of olde

I transferred all the kendraspondence content to this proffy site to be less insane, oh I mean, to streamline the brand and it's all nicely in tandem with some other moves happening.

Like how we moved across town to the cutest little cottage. I keep pinching myself at the good fortune, which leads me to the notion of favor.

I've been feeling some favor over my life. I learned recently that mentions of “favor” in the New Testament usually uses the Greek word "karis." I'm told its purest translation is "grace." And that's changing my conception of what favor has meant and looked like, at least for me, in the past. Because from my sloppy read of favor in Scripture, it usually entails God doing a mighty feat through a cracked or flimsy vessel. God favors the surrendered heart so he can do his thing. It challenges our present-day definition of favor, from the verb associated often with teacher’s pets and the noun associated with plastic eggs full of slime netted from a birthday party.

At first blush, there is no expectation tethered to our modern concept of favor. A coach runs plays centered around one player; a party girl hands out bath bombs to her guests. But of course there is an expectation. To whom much is given, much is expected. So score some goals with all that ice time. And invite me to your party next time.

Our family has been given a house to occupy for as long as Loverpants is in this school’s employ, and in exchange we pay the price of our proximity. We have surrendered privacy for community, boundaries for a lack of a mortgage.

Whereas God lavishes us with favor and expects nothing in return. He has already paid the ransom for our very lives. This is why the Gospel is just so impossible, so unmanageable. What could we even offer him?

And yet he makes like our turning hearts toward him like sunflowers arching toward sunlight is enough.

I’m overwhelmed by the favor God has shown me recently: our house, some writing opportunities, the unbridled love of family and friends. It’s too much.

And then I remember how long we have lived with housing uncertainty in our short 13 years of marriage. I think about how dry and dark the winter was when I was pitching my little typing hands off to just land one article with one measly pub. I can’t forget the trials my friends have faced down and had to take on the chin.

This too, is where God has shown favor. The favor of his restoration. think I like God doing a new thing even through old battered vessels best of all. It’s not just the unlikely characters that he works through. He shows favor even when we have trashed the house.

In the last few months, I have seen the restoration of my daughter’s easy, trusting smile to an otherwise furrowed brow. I have seen the reunification of a friend’s marriage. I have seen a friend get engaged and thrive in her career after a year of scorched earth. I have seen my baby brother blow out 30 birthday candles on a cake. God has shown his kindness when we couldn’t have muscled any of this on our own. He has restored the years the locusts have eaten and dried the tears that the vipers had shaken out of us.

Restoration is my favorite. I’m buckets of grateful. God is good. 

Sharing Walls and Moving House

Loverpants and my story is well-documented. We met as Resident Advisors in college. Sharing Walls, aka Building Community was the nexus of our romantic relationship. It is all we have ever known. Even when we have purchased a home, we have shared walls with other condo association tenants. We have lived in the country, in the city, and we have always had people living either above or below us.

It is not the life I thought I wanted, but it's the life that I would not trade.

Our two children have only ever known this life. They came home from the hospital to a beehive of activity. We actively feared that if we employed the Ferber-method, we'd have some explaining to do to our neighbors. (We promise! We're not neglecting them by letting them cry! We're just trying to get more than 20 minutes of sleep at a time! Fingers crossed, hey? {Insert maniacally hopeful eyebrows raised in pleading hope that this works}).

We have experienced all the benefits and the drawbacks of living in close community with people whose blood we do not share which have included: feeling like a constant disruption; dealing with near-constant disruption; getting contact high from the weed being smoked downstairs; sharing holiday gatherings; never truly feeling alone; being able to call upon built-in babysitters; having an extended family.

In fact, we just moved to live at a boarding academy. We are off-campus now until housing opens on campus. We may live here for the rest of our careers, sharing walls with sweaty teenage boys. For us, the expense of living at a boarding academy is second to none. We have all the access to a city, take many of our meals in the school dining hall, and get to enjoy close proximity to brilliant people. Also, we have no house payment. Kerchingaling.

When we were searching for our temporary housing, though, we relied on beaucoup online resources since we were not able to fly to prospect apartments. That's right, we had to ferret out housing from afar and hope that it would be as described.

We used all of the usual online resources to browse apartments online and even benefited from the new venture of Cara Concierge who put boots on the ground when we couldn't otherwise be there. We couldn't have landed in a better place, with better landlords and better location. Most of all, we're glad to share walls once again with non-family. We may not be the HGTV poster family, but we're grateful for our grown-up life that makes us feel like young RAs.