Timeline of my Becoming

I got caught up with an old hs friend recently, and found myself sharing the synopsis of my life since high school. Then I realized that while many of my friends and family know what they've lived through with me, not many people know the whole thread. So here it is in writing, my timeline. I tried to be brief, but it's not really in my nature...

I graduated from high school in North Canton, Ohio, and went to college at a little liberal arts college in Indiana. Met Justin there my last semester, married him a year after we graduated. Our honeymoon consisted of a 6 day cross country drive from Ohio to move me to Los Angeles to live with him. He was sick and missed most of the drive. Fortunately, that gave us a great starting point to improve from, and ten years later I can still say that being married to Justin is the coolest thing about my life.

Justin's dream was to work in the film industry, specifically visual effects. He did that in LA through the first year of our marriage, and then for two more years in the SF Bay Area. I ended up working at his company as an admin, since it paid pretty well. Our company made the effects in the first Matrix movie, that was a pretty fun ride. While we were there, his focus turned from animation toward computer system administration, and he has pretty much made that his career since then. After about two years of the relentless pace of the movie business, we picked a spot on the map that fit some agreed-upon parameters (proximity to parents, friends, church), packed up and in April of 2000 moved back across country to Troy, Michigan, north of Detroit.

We ended up being in the Detroit area four years, although for half of it we were making plans to move elsewhere. Maren Elizabeth was born in Jan of 2002; five months later our church announced it was starting a new church in Salt Lake City. We felt like we had been specifically prepared by our life experience to make the move and be part of that new church, and spent the next two years working out how to make that move happen.

Once we worked out selling our house, a job, and more moving snafus than it is worth my time to write about, we were involved in helping this new church get started. Justin helped launch the video production part of the services, and I gave input into the children's and women's ministries. Along the way Jesse James barreled his way into the world. At the tender age of 2 he has already earned himself the nickname "The Juggernaut," after a character from the last X-Men movie who, once he gets going, builds momentum until he is nearly impossible to stop.

By Spring of 2007, we felt the church had reached a point where it is past the beginning and in fact is starting to expand in new directions. We also felt we had done what we went to Salt Lake to do, so we made plans and moved one more time, this time to settle by Justin's parents in Texas. Lord Almighty, I seriously hope we are done with moving to new states.