Married Life: Summary

Hello all,

As you may have noticed, I return to this blog from an exceptionally long absence from writing. I think I have a pretty good excuse, since I got married in January.

The wedding was wonderful. It went by very quickly--so quickly, in fact, that the only food Alyse and I ate was two bites of cheesecake apiece and a sliver of cake that we shared. The ceremony came off without a hitch--although my groomsmen could watch me bending my knees so that I wouldn't faint--and the reception was beautiful, thanks to Alyse's cousin Justyn.

Recently, we have been trying to determine our summer plans: if we should stay in the City (where we both have jobs but need to pay for housing) or move back to Iowa (where we can stay with Alyse's father for free, but don't yet have jobs). Also, we have both received interesting job offers for the future: Alyse may be able to teach an art class at a Manhattan YMCA and I have the opportunity to tutor high school students in the fall.

I also have my fall classes lined up: Culture and Aesthetics with Prof. Middleman, Ethics with Prof. Kreeft, History of Economic Thought with Prof. Tokarev, Constitutional Law with Prof. Tubbs, and probably Financial Accounting with an incoming business professor. Alyse and I will be living off campus, so I'll fill in the hours that I'm on campus with my work for IT.

I do have some new topics to write about. In my next post, I want to discuss how marriage has changed how I manage my time, what I have learned and how I need to improve. Additionally, I will talk about how Alyse and I are developing our communication skills. Later this summer, I will hopefully be able to develop my conception of the original three spheres of government (not executive, legislative, and judicial) and their proper organization.

Until then, I'll try to make an effort to update more regularly. I hope you are all well and enjoying spring in all its beauty (and not New York fickleness - we had flurries the other day!). And on Easter, I will be thinking of all my family and friends as Alyse and I celebrate Christ's conquest of death and sin.

Take care,

Jordan

Moving Up: An Engaging Discussion

So, about this whole marriage thing ... it's really great, but there's something that gets me about it - maybe its that long engagement thing. I'm not too down with that.

Actually, that's not really how it happened. Alyse and I were praying about our wedding, and we got this sense that the date wasn't going to be when we thought it was. We talked to some people about the wisdom of moving it up and got mixed responses. So we kept praying. One night, we got our answer - God told us "January." So we're moving the date up to January 3, 2009.

This is very exciting and scary at the same time, because there is a lot to do between now and then. We're planning a wedding while school, work, and (any semblance of a) social life fight for our limited time. Neither of us have ever planned a wedding, etc. But it is exciting because I cannot wait to spend the rest of my life with Alyse, to keep learning how to love her in new and deeper ways.

We need your prayer in this; prayer for wisdom, prayer for provision, prayer for sanity. We're stepping out in faith -- one of the most important parts of this engagement is that it is God's timing and not ours (I was ready to wait until after college) -- so we want one of the most important parts of our marriage to be God's timing and our faith in His active role in our relationship. That's a hard balance to maintain because everything in the world screams against it - and God is so paradoxial and difficult to understand that what He wants often doesn't makes sense.

We want to be where God is, where God leads us. He guides our steps and makes our paths straight. We want to walk towards Jesus (like Peter on the water), not caring what is around us or underneath us or behind us, as long as He's there. And we're still trying to figure out how to do that in the daily grind. So please keep us in your thoughts and prayers ...

Thanks.