Moving On to Florida

Continuing the saga from the last post...we left Pennsylvania and headed down to Florida. Mike's sister and brother-in-law had an extra master bedroom in their house and invited us to come live with them while we looked for jobs. They said Florida had tons of job openings. So, two weeks after our marriage we moved in to their house.

We began earnestly looking for jobs. We sent out what seemed like hundreds of resumes and Mike went to several job fairs. It seemed like all the job openings were low wage jobs like cleaning hotels and things like that. All professional level jobs had tons of competition and the Lord just didn't have it planned for us to have jobs yet. Thankfully both of us were able to come into our marriage debt-free and that allowed us to not have that stress hanging over our heads during the no job period.

Three months later, the Lord gave me a job with Wycliffe Foundation and a few weeks later Mike was able to get a "temp job" through a friend of his brother-in-law. They needed help for a few days at their copy shop and Mike filled in. After a couple weeks of each day being told to come back in, they finally just asked him if he wanted to stay on full time. Just a little after that I decided to leave Wycliffe Foundation and go to work for my sister. We grew up running several different businesses with our family, so it was only natural for us to work together. We get along very well and don't have the normal fights that everyone seems to expect you would have in working with family. Frankly, I love it. My mother instilled in us an entrepreneurial spirit practically from birth so I love working hard and seeing our efforts be blessed by the Lord. It is much different than being a secretary in a Christian school, but after my last position in that role, I was honestly a little burnt out on vocational ministry.

Let me back up though...we moved out of Ken and Kristin's house after almost 10 months. They jokingly commented often that living with their 3 young boys was the best birth control we'd ever have. While we were anxious to be in our own place, I'm grateful for the hospitality and the acceptance Ken and Kristin gave us during our time in their house. I was able to get to know them much better than would have ever been possible had we not had that time together.

In May of 2004, the Lord gave us a little condo in Kissimmee, FL. We enjoyed our first place together. It was about 10 minutes from work for me and I enjoyed that as I had previously been driving an hour to work each day. We were still not even unpacked from Guam when the Lord allowed Hurricane Charley to come through Kissimmee. We had gone through much stronger typhoons in Guam, so this seemed like nothing to us. We even stood in front of our large front windows and held them in against the wind and rain to keep them from breaking. Hindsight might say that was a little foolish, but at the time, we thought it was a good plan. After the hurricane passed, we went outside to check everything out. We saw several windows broken in the condo above us, but didn't know the extent of the damage. By the time we walked in the front of our condo (thinking we had made it through okay), gallons of water were pouring through our ceiling fan in the living room. Through the next few days we found that the roof had severly failed and the condo above us had standing water all over and the ceilings had begun falling up there. We could see water spots starting in our ceilings and knew it was only a matter of time until our condo would be destroyed as well. So, three months to the day after we finally had our own place, we moved all of our things out of our condo and moved in with my sister and her family who also lived in Kissimmee.

More to come soon - sorry for being so wordy. :)