I’ve got BIG news. I have accepted an invitation to join the pastoral team
ET Family Church in Nanaimo, BC. Our family will be relocating to beautiful Vancouver Island sometime in the next couple of months.
I know that will come as a shock to a lot of people. Join the club. It is still a pretty big shock to us, never mind anyone else! But we cannot deny God’s hand in all of this, so we take the step forward with boldness and joy.
If you live in Nanaimo and have some how discovered this obscure corner of cyberspace called Siggy Urbanite, let me say that we are very excited about the next chapter of our lives. We haven’t spent a whole lot of time exploring Nanaimo, but it is an amazingly beautiful place. ET Family Church has a great leadership team that we are honored to join, and being part of
Island Tehillah has got me pumped! So please jump into the conversation and introduce yourself. Post a comment or send me an
email. We want to get to know you!
As excited as we are about Nanaimo, we are really going to miss Vancouver, especially our precious friends that we have journeyed with over these past couple of years. Our ‘living room church’ family has been so dear to us we feel like a huge part of our heart is being ripped from us. To say this has been a difficult decision is an enormous understatement. We love where we live, we love our church family, we are passionate about the challenge and energized about the potential of ministry downtown, and we have made such great friends among our neighbors. But for some inexplicable reason, we know our time downtown has come to an end.
I guess this is the primary reason why this blog has been pretty much dead the past couple of months or so. We have needed to work through a lot of deep issues. We dreamed so long, worked so hard, and (seemingly) sacrificed so much to get downtown, and now only 24 months later we are moving on. Something of that doesn’t make sense to me, yet I have no doubt it is the right thing.
We have no regrets, and we would not have traded this experience for the world. We feel like we have changed, grown, and matured in so many ways. It has been so much more than a ‘stepping stone’ to the next chapter in our lives, but we do feel like it has uniquely prepared us for that next chapter.
So stay tuned. I never thought I’d live on Vancouver Island, but here we go!
Along with all the life altering events we have been processing these past few weeks (see 'Siggy Urbanite Is Moving to the Island'), we have also be planning a major celebration. My lovely wife has reached a mile-stone birthday which called for something special. Her sister Ardis decided she was going to come out from Calgary, as she has been known to do, and spend a week with us during this time, which was special. We also planned a big party for Saturday night, which was SO much fun - thanks, everybody, for coming! Aileen really enjoyed the evening and all the '40' stuff she got!
But the big surprise was today. We decided to go out for lunch ('spontaneously', of course), and when we got to the restaurant there were Aileen's other two sisters from Edmonton, Ang and Pam, with Pam's little 3 month old baby boy Clayton, who Aileen has just been dying to see! You should have seen the look on Aileen's face once she realized what was happening! She was shocked, and everybody was blubbering - they blame that on the Meier side of the family tree...
So we are having a very memorable, special couple of days! It's been in the planning stage for about 10 months, and we managed to pull the surprise off with great effect - which is amazing because we don't do 'surprises' real well. Aileen is thrilled! Ah, what FUN!
