Adventures in Wedding Planning . . . and Ireland

I'm beginning to resign myself to the fact that my current situation in life will not allow me to have any sort of consistency in the blogosphere! Yesterday, Kristy and I spent what seemed like hours registering at Bed, Bath & Beyond and Target. (Click on the links for the registry at each place.) They finally kicked us out of Target at 10pm when it closed.

Kristy was able to pick flowers and colors (black and purple) for the wedding this last week. We also had a pre-marital counseling session, got the invitations out, met with the wedding coordinator, ordered our wedding bands, and decided on a tuxedo place.

On Tuesday, we went to a Switchfoot concert at the Ogden Theater in Denver. It was a great show and I was hoping to write up my own little review, but alas, wedding plans call. I'll say this for now, though: Jon Foreman has stage presence. I could tell the front man was battling a mild cold from the get-go. Just wasn't hitting the notes 100% and quite often was opting for the lower harmony notes. With his voice struggling and probably feeling other cold bug symptoms, Foreman made up for it with stage antics and, in response to chants from the crowd, a few spontaneous vintage numbers from the bands pre-Atlantic Records days.

In between all of the wedding preparations, Kristy and I were able to confirm that we are definitely headed for Ireland. For the sake of time, I'll just post part of an e-mail that I sent off to a few of our colleagues in Ireland today:

After a crazy process of prayer and consideration, Kristy and I have decided that Ireland will be our destination next summer. It was a bit unexpected for both of us, given our excitement to be involved with the church plant in Cologne, but it's much more consistent with my own heart burden for the UK/Ireland (oops, I mean Ireland/UK) corner of Europe. This is just one "pro" in a longer list than that of our Deutschland option. I look forward to talking through how I might split my time between the needs of GEM YM and my desire to apply my rather short inventory of gifts and abilities to the church planting dialogue in Ireland and the rest of Western Europe. I also look forward to seeing how God will use Kristy's many gifts and skills with GEM YM and in areas of social justice in Ireland.

Hoping to get some time this next week to blog a few thoughts from this great book I keep talking about (I know, I know - that's what I said last week!), as well as a few more details about our decision to head for Dublin. We'll see.