One Month Later, the Hipps Blog Returns

Well, I said on Day One that I wasn't making any promises in terms of updating this thing daily. Still, I have shocked even myself with the extreme tardiness of Blog Post #3. Sorry about that.

Things are happening in the Hipps household. Well, okay, really, I guess the major thing that's happening today is that someone's coming over to appraise the condo / apartment that we live in, so that it can be rented out by a rental agency instead of the nice lady who we've been renting from for almost a year now. This is because we're moving at the end of September, when our lease runs out.

After having lived in North Carolina for almost three years, and after finally feeling like we're making some friends and becoming more rooted in our church, we believe we're being called to move back to Athens, Georgia to be involved in Mill Creek Community Church. I have accepted my old position with Connected Technologies, but other than that (and even including that), everything's different. We are looking at buying a house, maybe finally being rooted in one spot for more than a couple of years. We'll see.

Living in North Carolina is awesome. I love the barbecue, the scenery, the easy commute to work, the friends we've made, the church we've been involved with here (Raleigh Vineyard Christian Fellowship), and the convenience of our apartment to pretty much everything we could possibly need. There is a huge outdoor shopping center pretty much around the corner, the Cary Towne Center Mall around the other corner, scads of fast food and non-fast food restaurants nearby, including Cook-Out, the best fast food burger and milkshake place I've ever been to, including Sonic. We're two hours from the beach, four from the mountains. We haven't actually taken advantage of either of those facts, but I like that we could if we wanted to. Did I mention the barbecue? You just can't get that stuff in Georgia. We recently discovered a place a few blocks from our home that sells it in take-home containers. We'll probably stock up heavily on the way out of town.

Then again, living in Georgia definitely has its perks, too. We'll be an hour or less from Atlanta, the cultural center of the southeastern United States. We'll be three hours or less from our family. We have a lot of friends nearby, and we'll be involved in a church where we know the vision, know the pastor, and are excited about the possibilities. I believe that this is a move of God, having taught us whatever we needed to learn from our time here, now sending us back to live as older, wiser Christians in a community that desperately needs them, taking part in a church where we can serve non-Christians, new Christians, and younger Christians and be served by older Christians ("older" and "younger" in the sense of spiritual maturity, not necessarily years of living). It is exciting to think about what God might do in our lives in Athens.

If we ever do move back to North Carolina, though, I hope we move closer to Asheville. I love the mountains.