5.  I will be hopeful that the economy will be better in 2012 than it has been for the past five or six years.  Its tough to be out and about doing my job and seeing the discouragement on the faces of people as they shop.  It’s tough to read the newspaper or read on the internet about job closures, interest rates going up, and price gouging.  So here’s to a better economy in 2012.

4.  I am hopeful that my family will have a healthy year in 2012.  With the rising costs of medical services, being healthy will be financially beneficial.  I pray all of you will be healthy in 2012.  I am finishing 2012 having lost 11 pounds, so far. I plan on staying on the diet plan for as long as I can lose weight.  I know that my son gets braces the day after he turns 12, but after that, I simply hope we are all doing well health-wise. 

3.  I am hopeful that people will be kinder in 2012. I am making kindness my mantra.  I have grown tired of unkind attitudes.  I want us to do more than “just get along.” I want to see people taking care of other people, regardless of our faith, or lack thereof.  Treating others the way I want to be treated is something I’ve been teaching my children for several years. I want to see it taking place in and out of my household.

2. I am hopeful that many others will become followers of Christ.  As a life-long follower of Christ, I want to see more friends and family come to a relationship with Jesus Christ.  The past two years hve been a wonderful testimony of hearing about some old friends, classmates, and others who have come to the Lord. It’s refreshing to hear about and wonderful to encourage others to find faith and hope in Jesus Christ.

1.  I am hopeful that this could be the year of the return of Christ.  No one knows the day or hour, not even the Mayans, the preacher sitting behind his desk, the man yelling from the street corner, or the religious magazine editor. We do know that the Bible say’s Christ will return.  May He find us faithful. 

My prayer for all of you is that we find time to develop relationships with those around us. We aren’t here by accident.  We don’t wander through life aimlessly. Rather, we are here on purpose and with a purpose.  To all my friends and family, and those who I do not know but somehow you’ve found yourself reading this, May God be with you and may 2012 be an outstanding year for you and yours.

In January we all participated in a 21 day fast at the request of our pastor and that opened the door for us to hear great things at our church’s Holy Spirit conference in February. 

The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl and that made my wife and me very happy and we are hoping for a repeat in 2012.

I got terribly sick with the flu in February which I seldom get the flu but it was so bad, I can’t forget about how awful I felt.

In the spring, my son Isaac played on a soccer team for the first time and he loved it. Our daughter Anika joined the local swim team and she was way better at swimming than I thought she could be. 

In June we took our first family vacation in four years and went to Yellowstone National Park.  It was the first time Myleen and the kids had been to Montana and Wyoming and it had been 47 years since I was last at YNP. 

We spent most of the summer shopping around for a new house, visited some great friends in Seattle on Myleen’s business trip.

The kids and I got to golf, A LOT during the summer.  I think I got in 13 rounds of golf. That is great considering I averaged 1 and a half rounds of golf the previous 11 years. 

In October we made an offer on a 3300 square foot house and moved in on November 22nd. 

Also in October Anika started piano lessons and she is doing very well with it.

Myleen has been battling different ailments this past year and the Lord has brought her through each of them. 

As I look back on this past year, I’ve  been blessed by my growing kids and how well they’ve been doing in school. I’ve enjoyed working with the little people (ages 3-5) at our church, Valley Christian Center, and now that we’ve bought a home, I’ve enjoyed setting up our nest and looking forward to spring when we can sit out on our gigantor deck. 

As we move to a new year, I look forward to seeing what God has in store for us as a family and being able to be used by God in whatever capacity he has for my family and myself. 

I pray God’s best for all of you and May you have a very Happy and Blessed New Year.

The unpacking is almost complete and arrange the house to be our lifestyle has been fun.  The kids have their rooms all set up to their liking and mommy has her kitchen arranged.  Our life in our new house has commenced and other than going back to our former home to clean it, we are moving on. I will try not to use the word “move” any more. Except when my kids need to move. Then I will hire movers.  Well, except for when they go off to college and then I will gladly help them with that. But that’s a long, long, long way away. Right?

Our new house is within walking distance of my two children’s elementary school and next year Isaac only has to walk two blocks to junior high and maybe five blocks to high school. We are looking forward to getting moved and we will be able to celebrate the holidays in our new home.

Yesterday I did a final walk through with our agent to make sure the work we requested got finished. Weird to see the house empty. Looks way bigger than the 3300 square feet that it already is.  820 feet of that footage is our underground garage. 

Now the packing and moving begins.

Six years ago we bought a brand new house. In the Bothell, Washington area. We watched it being built from the ground up. Picked out the many options that we wanted to see in our house, and enjoyed having the interior painted in “our colors.”  We enjoyed a few Christmas’s there and even had a lot of snow in the few years we lived in it. But change would come and we uprooted our family and moved to Idaho.

With the economy being in the tubes like it was and still is, we felt we just needed to rent for a while and wait and see if God would open doors to homeownership in the future.  Earlier this year, we visited a local bank and found out good news and delayed news.  The good news was that they could definitely get us a loan, the delayed news was that it wouldn’t be able to happen until October of this year. So we put buying a house on the backburner and started attending several open houses, waiting until the day we could offer on it. 

We had chosen three homes during that six month span, only to watch two of the three become sold and the other was still out of our price range and it’s owners pulled it off the market for a while.  That left us with searching for a house that we would like. 

There were some really good things that happened for us while we waited. One was that we were able to know exactly what we wanted in a house.  Like how many rooms we really needed and since we are not fixer-upper people, we needed a house that was basically done for us.  The second really good thing that happened for us was that the interest rate had fallen a full percentage point and that made our house a lot more affordable.

What we’ve learned through these past few years is to “trust God no matter what.”  To really depend on Him to comfort us, provide for us, and direct our steps.

But you got to know that with large walnut trees comes thousands of leaves.  Today as I look out the window and see these two trees, they are all bare of leaves.  Those leaves have all fallen to the ground.  We’ve spent a bit of time raking them up and bagging them, and the yard waste guys have been good picking the bags up and hauling them away. 

One recent day my next-door-neighbor was using his gas powered blower to blow leaves away and while I was gone, he blew even blew ours into a big pile.  I had told him that when we got back from our trip to Spokane, we’d be picking them up and bagging them.  Well when we got back from Spokane, “someone” had already bagged and disposed of eighty percent of our walnut tree leaves. 

You gotta love good neighbors.

At any rate, Isaac is a great kid who is currently in the fifth grade and is unfortunately learning to love my high school enemy, the Lewiston Bengals.  We have been attending my high school’s (Clarkston Bantams) basketball games lately, and he refuses to root for anything in Scarlett and Black.  I thought I had done a better job raising him.  Funny how I taught him to dislike (actually worked on getting him to “hate” the purple and gold of the University of Washington, since I’ve been a lifelong Washington State Cougars fan, and then for us to move back here to the valley and live on the wrong side of the river when it comes to school districts. You see, the Lewiston Bengals colors are purple and gold.  He booed them when we first moved here, not knowing that if we continue to live in Lewiston, he will be wearing those colors. But since we’ve now lived here for three years, he has grown accustom to Lewiston being purple and gold but still dislikes the Huskies. Kudos to him.  It’s a dad’s dilemma to have his son rooting for the other team. 

This Friday night is the Lewiston-Clarkston Golden Throne basketball games and I will find myself sitting by myself on the Clarkston side of LCSC’s activity center, (my daughter will be busy going back-and-forth between sitting with me on one side, her mom and brotheron the other side, and being a concession stand queen), while my son, who just last year joined me in laughing when the LHS faculty couldn’t even put up a descent “L” in the stands whenever their team was at the free throw line, sits on the other side.  What’s a dad to do? 

To my son Isaac, I always say this to him every single day, “I love you. I love you a lot. I love you all the time.”  Happy 11th birthday and Go Bantams.  ( I wonder if there any good homes for sale in Clarkston?)

Most of us reading this I am pretty sure are busy living.  What we are living for is relative to each person.  Some will say they live for their families, others will say they live to get wealthy, and others will simply say they live for others. 

In my house are many ants.  I am pretty sure they must be Australian ants because the Bible say’s that the ant stores up in summer so that they will have plenty when it’s, well, not summer.  (Its currently summertime in Australia).These ants either did a terrible job this past summer finding food to store up or maybe they were just plain lazy. At any rate, they now own my basement I am getting busy helping them die. 

So, what’s your take, are you busy living or busy dying?  What gets you up and out of bed each morning and gets you through the day, and allows you to call it a day and crawl into bed at nighttime? Food? Money? Family? 

So just as Red said in the Shawshank Redemption movie, “Get busy living or get busy dying,” I say likewise.  I say, in all you do, give thanks to God above, be kind to those who are put around you, and get busy living.

I needed more time to think about it and since it was the first one we saw, we wanted to continue looking around. Well our internet search didn’t turn up another acceptable minivan within 125 miles. So we started looking at other options. Maybe a smaller car would work for us.  Three weeks later we had some finances in place and we decided to pursue the minivan again.  When we checked on it on the internet they had lowered the price by $1300.00

We did the drive around thing, talked to Aaron the salesman and then started the negotiation.  We had a ceiling on what we wanted our monthly payments to be and we had the backing of our credit union. A credit union this particular dealership did good business with.  Their first offer back to us was to lower it another $500.00.  We liked that but wanted a lower monthly payment.  We were determined to get the lower one and it paid off.  They got it down to what we thought was acceptable and the interest rate was even lowered by by .5%. 

Once we agreed on a price for the car, it went to the financial guy who proceeded to try and sell us on warranties and loan protection. We declined both. Some of you reading this might be asking why we would decline a warranty, well here is why. Eight years ago when we bought “Fred” the Xterra, we paid $2,400.00 for an extended warranty and nothing happened to the Xterra. A couple of years after the warranty expired, Fred broke down three times and we paid out $3,000.00 on expenses. Money that we actually had in our pockets.  We didn’t want to pay any more than we had to for the new car. Yes, we are risking breakdowns, but that’s a given with cars. I’ve seen brand new cars broken down on the side of the road and they probably had the warranty to get it fixed, but experience with warranties on our side tells us we are willing to risk it and do our best to afford to pay for anthing that breaks down, hopefully in about five or six years. 

Whereas in the past we’ve struggled with the car buying experience, this time, we had a great experience.  Now its time for a Sunday cruise somewhere.