Moving to Chadron, Nebraska

Ann has received a call to be the minister of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Chadron, NE 69337 and we intend to arrive there around February 25, 2011. My last day on staff at Workplace Options will be Thursday, February 10. Ann's ordination is here in Durham on February 19. Everything else is to be determined.

My intention is to post here occasionally to share this experience, with the hope of maintaining connection with you in at least this one way. I'm excited and scared, sort of cycling between these two common feelings that arise when making a big change. I like to write and I am concerned about feeling isolated in a new place, so this blog is a response to these feelings.

I invite you to do an internet search of Chadron, NE 69337 to learn in this way about where we are going. Ann and I visited there in early December, 2010 and learned enough to feel we could be happy there. I grew up and went to college in suburban New Jersey, lived in New York City for twenty years and in Durham, NC for the 17 or so years following that. None of those places is like Chadron. It's been fun confronting my biases and doing the accompanying reality check. Someone from Chadron made the comment that people are different in Chadron from the folks on the coasts. My immediate reaction was surprise that he would lump people from both the East and West coasts together, as I'm willing to bet few people from the coasts would do the same. The implication I take from this is us "coasters" look the same to him, just as all midwesterners frequently get lumped together by coasters. Nice little lesson.

We were universally welcomed on our visit there, and some opportunities for me were presented as possibilities. So right now, I'm on the excited end of the seesaw. I'll close now as I'm feeling crunched to do some more of the necessary tasks before we move.