Holiday Greetings! It has been a dastardly long time since I’ve done an annual letter – I think the last one was probably while I was still in Alaska which would have been the end of 1998. The next few years that followed were certainly worth writing about, however I seem to have lost some of that valuable resource we know as “time” and was unable to put myself in one place long enough to write a letter worthy of sending out to people. That is, until this year. This year I have actually managed to send out 3 rather lengthy letters (which, for those of you who know me, are about the only kind of letters I write!)

So what has made 2003 so different, you ask? Well, a combination of things and a multitude of changes, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself so let’s just take it one month at a time, shall we? If memory serves, I believe this is also how I did it in 1998…

January…

…was a typical first month of a new year. You get the date wrong on most of the checks you write for that first week or so. Snow inevitably falls at some point (actually at many points since we were blessed with a White Christmas in 2002 here on the east coast). Finally you make your way into the dark days of…

February

We had our blizzard in February. I believe it was around the 17th that the white monsoon hit. I couldn’t have been more in heaven! I know that not everyone shares my affection for snow but for me, this was a piece of my Alaska and I did enjoy those days, especially while it was falling! February was also the month that I decided to begin the process to enter the mission field. I had been thinking about it in abstract ways since early December 2002, but didn’t really decide to go into a particular direction until February. I was looking into different mission organizations and had settled on MTW (Mission to the World). I’m not sure exactly when I began the application process, but I believe it was sometime around the end of the month. I also had the opportunity to take a trip with work to Jamaica which was incredible. We got to stay at the Ritz Carlton there in Montego Bay and it was fun and fabulous all the way through – the only downside being that I had the flu when we left for the trip and didn’t feel much better until the day before we went back home. Bleh.

March…

…brought warmer weather (eventually), lots of rain, and my birthday. Now I sit poised on the outskirts of my 30’s singing strange ballads about where on earth my 20’s have gone.

April…

…was full of rain, if I remember correctly. I also took a short trip to Colorado. I stayed in Denver mostly, but did rent a car and go out on road trip to Aspen where I accidentally wandered into a luncheon for some sort of Aspen society group. They found it amusing that I had joined their group and invited me to stay. I sat at a table with a former mayor and some city council representatives among others. It was truly a serendipitous afternoon.

May…

…is when I completed my MTW application, had my interview, and was accepted into their short-term mission program. I had begun working on my support letter when I also received some startling news at work. My manager found out that he was receiving what boiled down to a promotion and was going to be inheriting a huge amount of additional territory of responsibility. He already had Northern New Jersey, but now New York City and Long Island were being added to his region – our region. I saw this initially as the perfect opportunity to tell everyone that I was planning to take a year off and go to the mission field – after all, they were going to be moving our headquarters from Bridgewater, NJ to Manhattan and there was already someone there who was doing my job. So I told them my plan, but made it clear that I wanted to stay working here through the end of the summer.

June…

…began my commute from New Hope, PA to Midtown Manhattan for work everyday. For those of you not familiar with the area, New Hope is about 100 miles (give or take) from New York which meant I was up at 5am each morning to catch a bus at 6 which would get me into the city between 8:15-8:45 and to my office by 9. Then it was back out the door at 4:30 to catch the bus at 5:15 and be home by 7:30/8:00. This commute was grueling, to say the least. I got a LOT of reading done, but other than that my days just felt like they were being stolen from me.

July…

…changed everything. I had been watching my support cards come back in and the numbers were less than encouraging. I prayed about it, sought much advice, and explored other avenues in order to generate the support I needed to be able to leave in September. Nothing was working. Finally, I was faced with having to make a decision – my manager had come to me and asked what he should expect – was I staying or going? I knew he needed a firm answer. Staying meant that I would be moving back to New York. Going would mean I would certainly be losing my job regardless if the rest of my support came in or not. With only about 5% having been pledged, I came to the decision that I wasn’t prepared to take that big of a risk with nothing to fall back on. Rather than try to explain all the details of this, I’m also enclosing the letter that was sent out to my supporters which is far better than what I could sum up here. So July finished up with me working to move to New York – with my lease for up at the end of September, I had some work to do. I had decided to buy an apartment in Manhattan (with interest rates as low as they were, who wouldn’t?) so I acquired a real estate broker and got to work apartment hunting. Found one in the neighborhood known as Clinton (aka Hell’s Kitchen), put in a bid, had it accepted, and began getting together all of the documentation needed for the co-op board approval which is another letter altogether that I won’t bore you with now!

August…

…came without my really knowing where July had gone. I was still commuting into the city and was rapidly becoming tired from it. My co-op board interview time came and I met with two of the most smug, arrogant men whose only qualification for judging me was that they happened to live in the building where my apartment was going to be. They interrogated me, didn’t laugh at my jokes, and generally just made me uncomfortable. I left the interview feeling that things had just gone very badly and I didn’t know what the outcome would be. It was a couple of weeks later that I received word that they had rejected my application which meant that I was not approved to purchase the apartment. The seller wanted to take a second crack at it though, and asked if I would be willing to wait while he appealed the board’s decision. I agreed.

September…

…was full of cooler days, sweaters, and school buses. I heard back from the co-op board for the second time. They agreed to approve me for the building, but there was a catch (isn’t there always?) I had to agree to move in without my bird. My sweet bird is such a source of joy in my life and I love her to death, but I wasn’t about to give up an apartment for her, so I agreed to the board’s condition. There was always this thought in the back of my mind that I could just fight the battle of the bird once I was in the apartment. The end of September came along with the end of my lease. I had a harrowing few days of packing followed by one horrendous day of loading and moving all of my earthly belongings into storage until the rest of the apartment plans could be sorted out (closing, painting, moving, etc.) September 30 I took the bus one last time up to stay with my friend Nicole who was in the process of moving into NYC herself.

October…

…was madness personified. I was staying with Nicole for what I thought would be a couple of weeks when I heard from the co-op board at my building for the third time. They had decided to reject me again for no specified reason even though I had agreed to move in without my bird. I burst into tears (what else was there to do?) and decided that was the end of this battle for me. If these people would do this to my seller, what would they do to me when I eventually wanted to sell? It had already cost me a few thousand dollars that I wasn’t going to get back and I was too emotionally exhausted from the last few months to even think about going back to them again. I didn’t know what God was doing, but I knew I was seeking His will above all other things and if I just rested in that, He would bring me to the place he wanted me to be and that it would be better than anything I might have thought up. So I began looking at apartments to rent. By the end of October, I think I had looked at close to 30 apartments. Finally I saw one on the Upper East Side. It was a 1-bedroom for an unthinkable price for Manhattan and I fell in love with it and put an application in. Later that afternoon, I had a coffee date with a girl named Kim who had responded to an ad I had placed in my church’s classifieds a few weeks back (right after the board rejected me the first time). I had decided that if our meeting went well, I would propose a roommate situation to her that I thought would work well, especially with the layout of this particular 1-bedroom since the bedroom and living area are separated by the kitchen, bathroom, and door so as to allow for separate areas which could work well as a converted 2-bedroom. We met and I liked her immediately. She came to see the apartment and agreed that this could work very well for us both. My application was approved and I signed the lease at the end of the month.

November

I semi-moved into the apartment on 88th, that is to say I moved in with a suitcase, a bag, and a bird. Mid-November I went back to Pennsylvania, rented a truck, loaded it up with only my 14-year-old cousin’s help, and then drove it up to New York. Thankfully the Lord supplied me with 6 additional people in the city to help me unload and carry all of my things up the 3 flights of stairs (no elevator) and into the apartment. I had the following week off which I used to work endless hours in order to get the boxes unpacked, the IKEA furniture put together, and the apartment set up as much as possible before Thanksgiving weekend when Kim was moving in. By the end of the month, we were both at least sleeping there if not completely settled.

December

At last! This month has not been unlike it’s predecessors in its lunacy. I’ve had work and events and visitors galore. The final set was just before Christmas when my sisters came up to New York for a night. I left with them the next day and we drove straight through the night down to Atlanta arriving on the 23rd and don’t you think I was pleased to wake up on Christmas Eve with a cold? I’ve spent the last several days basically laying around drinking plenty of fluids coupled with plenty of Christmas cookies – it is the holidays after all!

So that was my version of 2003, such as it was. Obviously this letter won’t make it out until January or so, but I figure it’s not so thrilling that people can’t wait. Certainly I will not be making it into any national publications with this, but I wanted to at least give a heads-up to those who may have an interest as to what has been going on.

I hope everyone is well and will enjoy a fabulous and blessed 2004.

Blessings and Hope…