goodbye greensboro

We are currently 2800 miles away and yet, we haven’t stopped talking about you.  You have been our home for the last three years and we have gone through the good and crazy times together.  Here are the top 10 things we will miss about you (not in any particular order):

• Watching  (and feeling in our skins) the stark but pleasant changing of the seasons.  Where else can  you get Snow Days for a light dusting?   And being surrounded by the riot of colours in autumn is just lovely.
• Newcomers School - an incubator of changed lives and wonderful memories.  This place and the people who come here are very dear to our hearts.
• VIF teachers – meeting the world through you and “seeing” other parts of Greensboro through your eyes.  We also miss the Aussie VIF teachers and hope to catch up in Oz somewhere, sometime
• 1st Friday of the month – both with work colleagues (boy, a bunch of loquacious teachers are hard to kick out of a restaurant!) and fun evenings downtown
• Westover Church – where we have grown and stretched personally and in faith through fellowship and discipleship
• Dinner parties – always fun with friends
• Singing with the choir – On our US bucket list, we wanted to attend concerts of Christian recording artists.  We didn’t expect we would get  to sing with the likes of Point of Grace, Kurt Carr, Travis Cottrell and Cindy Morgan!  We traded our “G’days” with the choir’s “Y’alls” and struck friendships.   We livened many of our long road trips by singing along to choir CDs!
• Friendly Center – this one is on the list, just because we’ve dined, drank, met with friends, shopped,hung out or gone for walkabouts in this area so many times, we love it!
• Starbucks at Quaker Village – so we’ve converted to Starbucks, but that’s after the baristas finally got our drinks right.  A nice cool drink, or a warm cup of coffee or chocolate after a short walk  is always welcome
• e-friendly – the Lees have been an incredible blessing in [Craig's] life.  Thank you for giving Craig a chance to work with you.

When “he determined the times set for [us] and the exact places where [we] should live”, we never would have picked Greensboro… but it turned out to be an unforgettable place.

[Scripture quote - Acts 17.26, NIV; Photo from a Grasshopper game in Greensboro, NC, back in April 2010]

packing up

All my possessions for a moment of time.

Elizabeth I

Truth be told, my heart winced when we gave the piano away.   If I throw a tantrum (and an arm and leg along with it) then I could insist on shipping this massive piece of furniture overseas.  But I don’t have rocks in my head.  The hand-me-down piano was freely given to me and freely I need to pass the blessing on to others.  What is it about our material possessions that strongly take hold of us?

Thankfully we had the Memorial Day weekend to sort and wash and fold and stack and wrap and roll and pack and squeeze our belongings into a very limited number of suitcases, ready for the return home.  After shipping  almost 300 lbs of “stuff” back to Australia, we are still faced with the colossal challenge of packing our suitcases.  Difficult to do when each airline have different baggage limitations.

What is it about our material possessions that strongly take hold of us?  We promised we would keep our acquisitions to a minimum and yet we found many “little” things carefully wrapped with memories.   We already gave away clothes, household goods and furniture but still, we found many “little” things that made our temporary tent feel like home.  There were  presents kindly given to us, and these “little” things were even harder to part with.  To all these bits and pieces my heart cried, Mine.

One of my favourite stories is about a rich man who insisted at the pearly gates of heaven, that he had bargained with God to bring one suitcase of his wealth.  Peter, the gatekeeper, finally relented to this persistent man on one condition that he would inspect its contents.  The eager man opened his sharp and shiny suitcase to reveal  his most treasured earthly possession – bars of gold all neatly laid, and Peter exclaims, “What? You brought pavement?!”

What is it about our material possessions that strongly take hold of us?

[Cherishing our numbered days in the US and agonizing over what to bring back to Australia, June 2010]