This year was filled with change and hope for the future. This past summer, I left my employer for the past five years to work part time with two friends on a small mobile company. We help deliver text and multimedia content to hand held devices. I also started working part-time for a non-profit in San Francisco called ReIMAGINE. ReIMAGINE is trying to help groups and individuals pursue greater wholeness by integrating the teachings of Jesus into every dimension of their lives. I’m really excited about both opportunities.

I also got engaged back in April and got married in October. I’m excited to start working out our life together as one.

I’m also looking forward to our monthly trips in 2007. As part of our first year of marriage, we committed to taking one weekend trip per month for the first 12 months. So far, we have taken trips to Hawaii, Monterey, Sonoma County, and shortly we will be headed to Florida and then to Southern California.

Here is a picture from the Gundlach Bundschu winery in Sonoma. This winery might be developing into a family favorite. I went there with my mom and dad a few years ago. On this trip, we bought a bottle for my brother and his wife, for my mom and dad, and one for us. We are saving our bottle of the Gewürztraminer until December of 2007. We thought it would be a fun tradition to start purchasing a bottle every fall to save and enjoy the following fall.

This was a great year. So far, I’m setting into the change and discovering that marriage is a great thing and that a different way of life might be possible after all. It was a big change for me to go from a stable corporate job to work at a startup and a donor supported non-profit. The pay cut was large, but I’m currently enjoying the trade off. I’m less anxious, I have more flexibility, and more freedom to seek the movement of the spirit and respond to it in the day to day workings of weekly life. I also have more time to read, explore my neighborhood (and the apartment dumpsters) and think about creative ways of saving money here and there and simplifying.