among friends

Yesterday we reluctantly returned from a beautiful weekend in San Luis Obispo. It was so refreshing to get out of the Bay Area and spend some time with Josh and Sarah, who are our newly engaged good friends. They are some of the funnest people we know, and we consider it a privilege to be their friends.

Especially compared to the San Jose area, San Luis Obispo is a small town. Bad traffic and jam-packed lives are far less common than in the Bay Area, and the people are just more relaxed in general. The downtown area is probably my favorite out of any I've visited in California. Yes, I could get used to life there. Dang it! Just when I was becoming quite content about our living situation. . .



Getting away, even if for just a couple of days, often leads to discoveries or realizations about our lives. We tend to define ourselves by our surroundings and our routines, so it's a very helpful thing to be removed from all of that in order to see some things more clearly. One thing that Jon and I talked about was that we wonder if we've become too focused on being "responsible" rather than acting our age and having fun. We don't want to take too much comfort in our early bedtimes and overall restrictiveness and fool ourselves into believing that we are taking care of ourselves through those habits. Sometimes in caring for our bodies and minds, we neglect some of the needs of our hearts for adventure and spontaneity.

I also discovered that I can attend a church service and not have the urge to roll my eyes and run out the back door. After discontinuing our service at The River, we have only attended 3 church services to date, and 2 of those were at Five Cities Vineyard, close to San Luis Obispo. When I am there, I feel like I've walked into a family gathering. There is real, honest love in that place. And it is the most relaxed church setting I think I've been in. You don't have to walk through a stiffening, fake smile-inducing, small talk starting chamber before you enter. And the speaker is not so much committed to delivering the message he prepared as he is to paying attention to what the Holy Spirit is doing and discerning how to move with that. It's exactly what I've been saying I want in a church, and holy crap, it actually exists.

I didn't realize how much I needed a weekend to just rest and have fun with good friends.