Since moving to Arizona, Micah and I have been blessed by living in our community. And I mean really living IN our community. Being friends with people who live in our neighborhood. Working within five miles of our house. Going to church within two miles of house. It’s been amazing.
Let me just paint a picture for you briefly. Last year Micah lived in Lake Stevens with a friend. I lived in Seattle with four awesome girls whom I love with all my heart. I had a thirty minute drive to school down a road with a 40 MPH speed limit and forty stoplights. I was always late to work. We were engaged. We used to meet at the Everett Mall food court on Wednesday nights to plan our wedding. They had a very limited restaurant selection. We usually ended up splitting a piece of Sbarro pizza. It was greasy and gross. After three weeks of that, we gave up planning our wedding together. Somehow it got planned and it was awesome. I took care of the details and consulted Micah on the big stuff. We also started attending Mars Hill Church, which was amazing, but a horribly long commute from Lake Stevens on a Sunday night. Sometimes I would stay in Lake Stevens for the whole weekend to hang out with Micah (because Lake Stevens to Seattle is practically a long distance relationship), and Micah and I would drive down to church together. Then drive back. Then I would drive BACK down to Seattle in my own car at 9pm at night. Sometimes we would drive to church separately. Either way, it sucked. We also joined a community group that met in Mill Creek, which was kind of a halfway meeting point for us. However, we both had a 25 minute drive home alone after our weekly Tuesday meetings and then all our friends from our community group (who are awesome!) lived in Mill Creek, 25 minutes away from each of us. We spent a year not really living in our community at all. We were always driving. Always needing to be somewhere else that was at least a half an hour away from where we were.
So when we moved to Arizona, we REALLY wanted to live, work and play in our actual community. We didn’t want long commutes to work and we especially wanted to live close to our church. However, when we moved here we had no idea where we were going, what it would be like, or where we should live. All we knew was the address of Micah’s work and the location of ASU. We looked on Google maps and marked the spot right in the middle of these two locations, and decided that as long as it wasn’t the absolute, fear-for-your-life ghetto, we would live as close to this midpoint as possible. Thankfully the midpoint was South Scottsdale and we LOVE our lives. I won’t even tell you all the things we live close to. Okay, maybe I’ll tell you a few… In ten minutes or less, I can be at ASU, Micah’s (now old) workplace, Target, Sprinkles, Scottsdale Fashionsquare (complete with Anthro, Banana, Urban, Nordstrom, Crate and Barrel etc. etc.), In and Out, SMASHBURGER (okay, Smash is more like 15 minutes, but I HAD to add it to the list), the historic Old Town district, museums, galleries, multiple movie theaters, and a greenbelt (with 14 miles of running trails, sand volleyball, basketball, frisbee golf, etc. etc.). But most importantly we live seven minutes away from our church and about the same distance from our pastor’s house where we meet for Missional Community every Wednesday. We could not be more abundantly blessed.
So now our life is vastly different than last year. It looks more like this…
Now I can drive to our Missional Community with Micah’s partially eaten cake in my lap. I decided that although he could eat the whole cake himself (and has in the past), he probably shouldn’t. So I took it to our Missional Community to share. There is no way I would have been able to straddle a cake dome for my whole 25 minute ride up to Mill Creek last year. But two miles? I can handle it…
I can also pack my dinner in my purse if I don’t have time to eat before Missional Community. I know it will still be warm when I get there, because it’s only a five minute drive! And Lisa, my pastor’s lovely wife, will gladly lend me a fork. (And, yes, this dinner is Hamburger Helper, and, yes, I did get it for 88 cents on sale, and, no, I am not ashamed. It was actually a pleasant little flashback to childhood dinners in 1989. But I might wait a year until I eat it again… Don’t want to overdo it!)
