No longer under one roof

This past Saturday, my bro moved out to head off to lower Manhattan to attend NYU law school. He packed relatively lightly, since his California wardrobe will need to be augmented significantly once the East Coast winter hits, so his room looks relatively similar to the way it did when he was living here, giving the illusion that not much has changed... but I guess in one sense it's the end of an era.

I think that my family was uniquely blessed in being able to have all four members under one roof for a little over a year after my bro graduated from college - working, studying, playing, eating dinner together, watching TV... it's been a very different experience living at home this time around because we were kind of living together as peers, as opposed to the clear-cut "hierarchy" of parent-child that you basically have in high school. Now that he's moved out and I'll eventually move out, we won't really have that experience of one family under the same roof again. I'll miss the good times of watching sports and talking poker with Dave, plus getting together to go through Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline. If you're reading this, dude, I'm praying for you. Study hard and take advantage of little opportunities to serve in the city!

Yet another wedding

Also this past Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending Frank L's wedding to Melissa F. Frank was my first small group leader from AACF my freshman year at Berkeley, and he's a very solid guy - he patiently put up with and facilitated the hard questions that I asked as a young believer and helped me build a spiritual foundation in the Word during our weekly Bible study meetings with the entire group. Since finishing up at Berkeley, I've also had the opportunity to periodically get together with him and a few other guys for dim sum every few months. He's probably one of the more unique guys I know... many of our dim sum conversations would inevitably end up on Frank's fascination for boar hunting, and back at Cal he had a predilection for buying cultural weapons with odd names off of the internet, like tribal clubs and such.

Apparently he met his wife in China while he was there on business and she was studying there as an exchange student. Ironically, according to some of our old Cal buddies I sat with at the banquet, he could be heard lamenting these frequent business trips to China as preventing him from being able to meet anyone here, so God providentially arranged for Melissa to show up where he least expected it. I guess it goes to show that no matter how "unique" you might be or what your circumstances are, God can be very creative in the ways that He chooses to bless His people.