So last month I posted an update on how our first couple of weeks here in Knoxville went. This post follows up on what’s happened since then now that we’ve been here a full two months. The short of it is, a LOT has happened, the long of it is…

To start things off, we give a huge praise to God that we’ve finally closed a deal to sell our house up in Dayton. It was a real relief to get out from under what was becoming a real financial burden. Its such a huge relief to have that behind us now.

On a similar note, we actually ended up purchasing the townhouse that we started out renting when we first moved down here. That was kind of out of left field for us, but about a month or so after we moved in, our landlord approached us to see if we might be interested in buying it from him. After discussing the pros and cons of such a move for a week or so, Crys and I decided that it would be a better deal for us overall to purchase it, and he was offering us a pretty good deal on the place, so we accepted his offer and now own the townhouse we’re living in. The main pros in this is that our mortgage payment is ultimately lower than our rent payment was, the fact that we’re building equity in what will eventually be a rental property for us (we’ll see how that goes), and now we’re not under any kind of time constraint (lease) to get moved out of here once we find a house or plot to build on. We can stay here as short or as long as we need to. Overall its a win/win situation for us. Another praise.

Another exciting happening is that Crys has gotten her business, Pure Promotions Inc., off-the-ground and up-and-running. She’s doing marketing and promotional consulting and materials primarily focused on small businesses. So if you know of anyone that owns their own small business that might need that kind of work, give her a shout! 

My work has been going great. I really enjoy working at Scripps and am starting to get more and more acclimated and involved in the real meat of the stuff that I’ll be working on. There’s still so much to learn though. I’ll be doing a lot of systems integration work using Microsoft’s BizTalk server, which I’ve never worked with in the past, so I’m learning a lot every day. I’ll be going to training in Boston next month (Crys will be heading back up to Dayton that week too) for a five day crash course in BizTalk (drinking from a fire hose) and will most likely hit the ground running when I get back from that.

Hunting season has arrived here in Tennessee (back in Ohio too actually) and I’ll be heading out after some deer with my bow here in a couple of weeks. I probably won’t have the opportunity to get out as much as I did last year, but hopefully it’ll be enough to bring home some fresh venison. Wish me luck!

Last time I updated I had mentioned that we had found a church that we liked, Northstar. We attended there for about four weeks or so. They’re a great church, but after those four weeks, we found ourselves feeling like we weren’t really being challenged there spiritually. The people were nice, we enjoyed the style of worship and the fact that it was smaller than many churches around here, but ultimately, it just didn’t quite feel like that was where God was leading us to make our church home.

So, one day as we were driving home from Kingston along Pellissippi Parkway, we noticed a sign on the side of the road for a church called Faith Promise church. The sign and location looked intriguing, so we decided to see if we could find out more information about it. We found their web site and did a little bit of reading and really liked what we saw of it. We listened to a couple of sermons available online by their senior pastor and REALLY enjoyed what we heard (I actually felt more challenged by what I heard in those sermons online than I had by anything I’d heard at Northstar previously). Based on that information, we decided to check it out.

We’ve now attended there four times and have really enjoyed it so far. We attended their monthly GroupLink meeting the other night to start the process of getting involved in a small group there. We even went so far as to trust them to watch Phoenix is child care…WOW that was a big step for us. The idea of handing over the second most precious thing in my life (Crys is #1, Phoenix is #2) to a nearly complete strange was really difficult for me. It has worked out pretty well so far though, he’s done just fine aside from being a little bit fussy, and it lets us focus better during the service. So anyway…will Faith Promise be where we end up making our church home? I think its still too early to say for sure, but so far its looking pretty good.

So that pretty much wraps up the first couple of months here. So far we’re lovin’ it just as much as we thought we would.