We Are Still Here!

I could definitely win the World’s Worst Blogger Award for how much I’ve neglected to write here over the last month and a half. I’m not even going to make any excuses, but instead I’m going to attempt to catch you up on the happenings in the Ginter household.

Blaise arrived in Houston on October 4th, thanks largely to some very generous people in our lives who made it possible for us to hire a moving company to haul our stuff down. And thanks also to the man who actually hauled it, because Blaise’s truck left him stranded overnight in the Middle-of-Nowhere, Arkansas on his way down. The man hauling for us was a few hours behind Blaise, so he picked Blaise up in the morning and took him to a parts store to buy a new alternator for the truck. In only a few hours, they were back on the road heading this way. By the grace of God they made it here late that night, and that’s when our new chapter in life began.

Over the last month since Blaise’s arrival, we have been trying very hard to settle in and adjust to living in Houston. I had a bit of a head start on adjusting to things like the traffic, the weather, and routines, but Blaise has adjusted quickly (in my opinion). We have an amazing church home that has taken us in like family (I’ll write about that in another post), we have the other missionary family–the Pierces–who really are family to us now, and we have developed routine.

We have experienced a fair amount of struggles over the last month, though. I naively thought that Blaise getting to Houston would lift so many burdens from my shoulders and things would get easier. That has not been the case. We feel that the spiritual warfare in which we are engaged has been amped up, as we have faced nightmares, intense boughts of discouragement and depression, and a very real heaviness that is unexplainable and sometimes crippling. We have struggled with Blaise finding a job, which came as a great surprise. He’s applied to countless jobs at this point, and had only two interviews–one of which the employer told him that Blaise used to make too much money and it didn’t make sense to him why Blaise would settle for so much less. Our opinion is that ANY paycheck is better than NONE. We have also struggled with homesickness, which certainly is to be expected, but which exists nonetheless. We miss our family tremendously, and we know this is really only a preview of what it will like to live on the other side of the world from them. We really underestimated just how integral our families have been in our lives over the last 8 years, and we are coming to terms with that now.

That’s a super summary of the last month, but I wanted to get something on the blog. Anything. And because you know how I feel about pictures, here are some from the last month (all from my iPhone)…

A beautiful night for a reunion…