Our 2010 Christmas Letter

Merry Christmas!

Gonna go with just an e-letter this Christmas, partly because it was impossible to get a family photo until a few days ago, when Phillip came home from his first semester of college. The bad news for you? Since I don’t have to make this all fit on one sheet of paper, I can ramble on and on as long as I wish . . .

Phil flew in last Friday from Oregon. He’s attending our alma mater, Corban University, where he’s surprised us by majoring in psychology. What doesn’t surprise us is that he’s working as a techie, doing sound, lights, and other types of technical support for chapel, classes, student activities, etc.

During his senior year at Blackhawk Christian High School, Phil had one of the lead roles—Prof. Dante—in the fall play, Get Smart, and the smallest part available in the spring musical, Peter Pan . . . he ran the laser light that flitted around the stage as Tinkerbell. He was glad to have his grandparents, my sister and her husband, and our friend, Ellen Zarfas, travel to Fort Wayne for his graduation.

While Phil was finishing high school, MelodyJoy was graduating from preschool at Blackhawk and now she’s a big kindergartner. As she looked ahead to kindergarten—having seen two brothers go off to college—she was quite concerned about what she would pack and where she might live. Now that she has a better handle on what kindergarten is all about, she is proud of the fact that she has a student body ID card that gets her into the high school basketball games for free and that she fills up her “Bee Chart” regularly. She loves learning to read and she’s very aware of everyone in her class, keeping Jeannette informed of all the social goings on in her class.

Melody lost her first two teeth in August and now her top two are starting to wiggle, too. She and I like playing The Lady Bug Game and “monkey-in-the-middle,” and she still loves being Jeannette’s omnipresent sidekick around the house.

This is Jeannette’s third year teaching preschool at Blackhawk and she’s now teaching three full days a week rather than just half days. She does a great job with the kids (and their parents). She also has been involved in a Bible study this fall. Because of my strange job situation, Jeannette has really had to be a single parent much of the time over the last 18 months and there’s no doubt it’s been wearing on her, but she’s hanging in there and we’re all surviving despite the challenges. I also have to mention that we bought a new garage door this year and Jeannette, with a little help from Jordan, proceeded to repaint the front of the house to match. It looks awesome!

Jordan never sits still—unless he’s asleep—so his latest hobby is building and riding his own longboards. For those who don’t know (as I didn’t) longboards are sort of like skateboards. He’s designed and made some pretty sweet rides and now every incline he sees leads to a conversation about how much he’d like to ride down it.

Jordan started this year as a freshman at Cedarville University in Ohio. You remember the old song, “I fought the law and the law won.” Well, Jordan fought mechanical engineering and mechanical engineering won. Since leaving CU, he’s been working in a shop that fixes up cars for resale and he’s learned a lot from this. We’ve also been working on trying to get him into a good aviation mechanics program because of his interest in a career in missionary aviation. We thought we had things all lined up for this January but, in the end, some of the details couldn’t be worked out and so Jordan didn’t feel peace about it right now.

Instead, believe it or not, Jordan is going to be joining me at Lincoln Christian University for the spring semester to take some classes in missions and Bible! He’s actually going to share my apartment on campus with me, which I’m sure will prove to be interesting on many different levels for both of us.

I continue to work at LCU, about 300 miles away from Fort Wayne, four days a week generally, “commuting” on Thursday or Friday nights for three days at home. I’ve listened to a lot of good books on CD during my drives. At LCU, we’ve had some solid success in our enrollment efforts and I get to work with some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Jeannette and I aren’t sure what the future holds for us, except that we’re fairly certain that we won’t keep up this long distance thing past this coming summer. We’ve been really blessed to have this job and to be able to keep our home in Fort Wayne, but it’s time for a change.

One big consideration as we weigh our options is what might be best for Jameson, since he’s now in 9th grade and would prefer not to have to change schools. Jameson’s favorite activities primarily involve computer games, the Wii and watching Myth Busters on TV, but he did surprise us this year by choosing to take a drama class at Blackhawk. While he’s enjoyed it, he hasn’t yet pulled the trigger on actually trying out for a school play. It was also kind of fun that he won a school-wide super hero costume contest during February’s homecoming week, for his portrayal of Link, a video game character.

This has been an interesting year for Jameson, as he’s been questioning his beliefs. We’ve had some fascinating conversations with him and he’s read some pretty heavy books—such as CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity . . . twice—along the way. We’re just trusting that he’ll continue to think and dialogue with us and others.

If you’re still reading this, thank you. If not, I forgive you. In any case, we all send you our best wishes for a great Christmas.