New Places

For quite some time now, my favorite destinations have been new places. I love going somewhere I've never been because that will mean that every experience I have in that place will be brand new. If we dine out at local restaurants, it will be the first (and maybe only) time I'll be at the restaurant. If we go to a local park, the same follows. For example, when Noelle and I were in Boston in April, everything was new. Just about everything we did was brand new to me. We even got to spend 24 hours in Newport, Rhode Island - a place I enjoyed thoroughly but will likely never be able to visit again.

I say all of this because this new city we are in, Portland, is sort of like one of those trips for me. Almost everything we are doing right now is new to us - new pizza joints, a local brewery restaurant, a new church, a run along the Wilamette River at Waterfront Park, and more. But the trick right now is that we are trying to call this new place home. It's far from Sacramento, where I grew up, and it's far from Monterey where Noelle grew up. It's much different than San Diego where I went to school and Azusa where Noelle went. But, nonetheless, we are calling it home. We have "home" programmed into our GPS and we refer to our new apartment as home already, but it's all so new.

I feel as if God has been preparing me to love new places for at least the past year because many people seem to prefer familiar things to new things. Not me. I prefer new things - foods I've never tried, music I've never heard, events I never knew existed. I prefer them over familiar stuff, and maybe that's been God's grace to me. In a city this large, it will take quite some time before things aren't new to me. Maybe in time this will be truly home. Maybe not. I'll leave that up to the Lord - wouldn't I be foolish to do anything else? For now Noelle and I are going to enjoy the next 3 weeks of having less to do than we've ever had in our married life so far. And we'll keep soaking up these new experiences.