Moving and growing.

I'm not sure if I already wrote about this, but we've settled on moving together, and living together at his parents' until we find our own place (which hopefully won't take much longer than two weeks). This drastically lowers moving expenses, and solves what we thought would be two weeks of living apart down in Cali (if I were to start working at the store immediately, I would have stayed with my parents' in order to commute with my mom every day).

Everything is coming together fairly smoothly, for the most part. The "jokes" from friends that we've changed our minds continue. Sometimes I'm not in the mood for them anymore, but I try not to get too bothered or annoyed because I know that we're very much loved up here, and it's pretty obvious all the reasons they would want us to stay. But we trust that God will provide in our absence, since He is the one that's calling us away.



An interesting, disturbing, and dramatic thing happened a few days ago. I had a bit of a breakdown over our finances, and briefly entertained thoughts that I really shouldn't have about how to help bring us more income. Then I had the brilliant idea to share my thoughts with Yubo, and how worthless I felt because I wouldn't be able to help in those ways even if I wanted to.

He rightly got upset with me.... very upset with me. And we had a very long, tense, emotional talk.

I think it was the first time we've ever ended a talk with something productive, and feeling closer to each other. It almost ended as usual, with him going out for a cigarette, and us feeling very tense toward each other with everything unresolved. But when he came back in, saying he was going to go to bed, I asked for a hug, and he held me. We apologized to each other. And we finished our talk with how to move forward.

I must say, I'm quite proud of us. It's taken us just under three years (of marriage; 8 years of being together) to learn how to end a conflict constructively. I just hope we can remember what we did, learn from it, and maintain a healthier approach to our future conflicts. Our next small group meeting, we'll be talking about conflict. Hopefully we'll be able to store up valuable nuggets of information and wisdom from the older couples in our group.

God is so good at laying out the perfect opportunities for us to use to equip ourselves for future battles.