At last...

We signed papers today on our lease. We will be moving in to our rental house on the 1st of September, this upcoming Friday. The house is on Hodge St, just a block from Elmwood Ave. (Check the title link for mapquest) This is truly a great location. Elmwood is the strip running through the heart of Buffalo with bistro’s, shops, and attractions for a good amount of the foot traffic through the city. If you zoom out to the 'city' view in Mapquest you can follow Elmwood Ave south to the City Central Business District which is were the black dot is at, or north to the Buffalo State Campus which is the Purple splotch. We are excited about the location of the house.

It is also a spacious house that will provide plenty of room for everyone moving into it. With three floors and extra bedrooms, we should all be able to have our own private space, as well as enough room to use our house as a center of ministry in the first year or so of our plant.

Tamy and Mary have been doing a wonderful job picking up furniture and house-wares at extremely affordable prices. We have been able to grab beds and dressers for everyone, as well as basic furnishing for the living spaces on well less than half of our allotted budget.

Keep praying for our jobs. We have had some good leads, but so far no one is actually hired. It sounds like the local cable contractor is going to hire me. The biggest concern about working cable again was the work load. This last year I have been working six days a week, sometimes 10-12 hour days; I am not willing to do that again. However, the contractor here has a much larger crew and so they only work five days a week, also, one of the technicians told me that they are great about working around schedules. Mary still has not heard one way or the other about the coffee shop she applied at. Pray that God would put her in the right job, and that she would have the patience to see where that is! We also have a good lead for Sam; turns out our property manager does quite a lot of work with contractors and will try to drum up a job for Sam!

God has been putting all of the details in order!

We have also had some wonderful times with people. We have had an opportunity to spend time with a lot of Tamy’s family. Her grandparents just recently celebrated their 50th anniversary, wow! There was a surprise party with a ton of family from all over the East Coast.

We also have spent quite a lot of time with Tamy’s best friend from childhood, and her husband, Matt and Jess. They are awesome people, we are blessed to have friends here with similar passions and desires; they will be a constant source of encouragement when so many of my family, and our great friends and spiritual family are so far away. They live only two hours away in Syracuse, which is a city we will be frequenting often as it is the site of our area meetings every other month.

Which brings me to our area. The Vineyard (for those of you unaware of it) groups local Churches into Areas that consist of a dozen or so Vineyards. We were able to gather with about half of the Churches in our area for a BBQ last week. We had a lot of fun, and were able to see friends we had already met, as well as make new friends. The area pastors include several ex-wrestlers which makes things fun for me! Everyone has been very encouraging and there seems to be a common set of values. We look forward to more time with those we have already met, as well as meeting others. The area leaders gather regularly to pray for different cities in the area, they will be coming to Buffalo late in September to pray for us, and for the city. We are greatly encouraged!

We are about ready to embark! Friday we are living in the city, and sometime in the next week, the rest of our team will arrive. Sam and Andrea are leaving Saturday and visiting an old friend on the way out.