Rory and I spent some time on Saturday taking pictures of places and things that all hold some sort of signficance to us here in Gretna. It was fun to collaborate and reflect on our time here together for this project. For example, the picture with the stopsign above tells a whole story of how when we first moved to Nebraska, we arrived at our original apartment at midnight only to be notified that they had accidentally rented it out to another woman. Ha! Welcome home, kids!
So we stayed at a hotel that night and got up in the morning with our U-haul and our cat and started looking for a place to live. We were looking at rental houses and other apartments and when we pulled up to this stopsign we saw the phone number on the apartment building across the street. We dialed the number from this exact spot and no more than 30 minutes later we were meeting the landlord, signing our lease agreement and so, so happy with the way things worked out. We were in a better location in a nicer place at a lower cost. It was amazing.
The pictures above are places and things, but the part about Gretna we have loved the most are the people. We have neighbors who we will miss and a church family that took us in the moment we walked through the door. Yesterday the church went out of pizza after service to bid us farewell and we felt so loved and cared for. We will miss these people dearly.
We got to go to a wedding last night of two of my camp staff from 2009. Jon and Jessi had a beautiful ceremony and the reception was wonderful. They asked me to pray before the meal, and I was so honored to be asked. It's a big deal for me to get to participate in these huge, momentous, life-changing days and I spent a lot of time thinking about what specifically I wanted to pray for them. This is a fantastic couple and I'm excited to see how God moves within their marriage.