Half A World Away

Nathan left early this morning for the States. He will be gone a month. My heart is heavy. I have shed more tears than is normal for me this time. One would think we have never done this before. Or that we have not endured worse. He has been away longer than this twice: once for 3 months at OTS and once for 6 weeks in Biloxi. I guess it's hard for a few reasons. One being that he is so far away and our daily communication will be more limited due to the time difference/lack of cellphone on his end. The other is that I have been spoiled the last few months with him being here all the time. Since November he hasn't worked 12 hour shifts nor has he worked nights. Our schedules have been in sync and we have had whole weekends together (a novelty for us!). I definitely wasn't mentally prepared for him to be gone starting today.

However, I must continually remind myself that it is only a month. Pretty soon we will be dealing with a 6 month deployment. And that I have many things to do to keep myself busy, like cleaning, working out, reading, studying the Bible, studying German, PWOC, house decorating, and getting everything taken care of so I can start subbing (yes, there are even more hoops to jump through!). But most importantly, I have been resting on this Scripture from 2 Timothy 1:

"For God did not give us a spirit of fear and timidity,

but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline."

I can do this! I know enough now to not think about this month in its entirety at any time. That is ridiculously overwhelming right now (and a large cause of the waterworks). I must only think about what I will do to get through today. And maybe tomorrow. But that is all.

Catching Up!

My goodness. I have been an awful blogger. So much has happened around here (and in places not here) in the last month or so.

--We went to Frankfurt for MLK Weekend. We really liked the city. We went on a walking tour and learned a lot about the history. We loved it. We also saw a soccer game.

--I joined the Protestant Women of the Chapel (PWOC) and started Beth Moore's Breaking Free Bible study with them. It is SO awesome!

--We jet-setted to Madrid for a few days. It is now at the top of our list of favorite places we have visited. The city is just so beautiful and we had some great food, mainly paella. Mmmm. We took a bus tour and saw Real Madrid in the semi-finals of the Copa del Rey against Sevilla. They won, but Ronaldo didn't play well. It was still awesome! Also I bought and gave Nathan his early birthday present there: their new Away jersey. It looks fabulous!

--We celebrated Valentine's Day with a nice dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Nussloch: The Gallery. Oh, and Nathan bought me a really pretty bouquet of flowers and some chocolate : )

--Nathan finally saw a doctor that put the order through for him to get an MRI when he gets back from the States in April. Woohoo!

--We celebrated Nathan's 27th birthday with all of his favorite things: chicken fried steak, ice cream, John Wayne and soccer.

--We purchased a total of 33 items from Ikea. Yes, we are crazy, but you would understand if you knew how little furniture we had coming over here. Our last trip was the icing on the cake: fitting a dining table, 6 chairs and a large 6 drawer dresser into our Accord because we didn't want to pay the 89 euros ($120) to have it delivered. Did we freeze our butts off while doing it? Yes. Were we successful? Yes. Are we mighty proud of our feat? Yes!