Mandi!

Please hold your breath while I impart to you fellow bloggy friends the good news!

Our dear friend Mandi will be moving in with us!! While many of you just read this sentence and wondered how a happily married couple could possible consider having a new room mate as good news, please let me provide some illumination.

First, Andy and I are incredibly social people. We like love having people stay at our house for extended periods of time. On top of this, Mandi is one our favorite people in the whole world and we adore spending time with her. So we're thrilled that we'll have a new member of our family for the next 9 months until she gets married.

Finally, even after she moves out when she gets married June 2010, we're still considering filling our house with people. We are becoming strong proponents of community and we've always wanted our home to be a place where the people in our community feel welcome and at home. We are beginning to believe, more and more, that God created us to be in community with other believers. Not just the "go to church on Sunday and Bible study once a week" style of community, but the living/eating/sleeping/sharing type of community that happens in a family. When we look at the early church we see so much of this type of church community, and we wonder whether we've lost some of the blessings that God intended for the church by separating ourselves into our own private little homes.

We're excited about experimenting in this "home-style" version of community. :D

Yay for Mandi!