525,600 Minutes

Jonathon Larson famously posed the question in his Rent song “Seasons of Love”, “525,600 minutes, how do you measure, measure a year?”  For Dave & me, there have been too many ways to measure the past year for us to count.  However I suppose “Seasons of love”, like the song title says, are really the best way to measure these past 525,600 minutes in Belfast.  I went into this year convinced that I would be counting down the minutes until I got to come back to the U.S.  Now I am finding myself holding onto each passing minute as I have to get ready to say goodbye to this place I have come to call home.  In a year that I thought would be seasons of longing to leave, it really has turned into a year filled with seasons of love.  How else could I measure a year which includes the birth of my first born child?  Her season of love is enough to fill an entire year and beyond.  A season of love from this year that I am dreading to leave is our church, Newtonbreda Presbyterian.  I really don’t think this church realizes how special it is – it really embodies everything that a Christian church should.  It welcomes foreigners with open arms and shows them love in every possible way.  I am also sad to be leaving a season of love which brought growth.  Dave has been blessed to work for an institution which gave him a renewed sense of purpose and I have been blessed to have a year to reflect and find out that moving to a new land is not as scary as it seemed 12 months ago.  We have both experienced seasons of life that could not have been experienced any place but here – a city that provided us a small reprieve from our hustle and bustle lifestyle in America.  A year of love looks like the face of our daughter, it looks like the church in which we worshiped, and it looks like the green and rolling hills we were blessed enough to call home in 2013.  All of these truly special moments which far too often get taken for granted taught us so much this year about living instead of just watching life go by.  These are seasons of love which truly turned into moments of love to last us a lifetime.

Images from 2013 Seasons of Love:

Outside Belfast City Hall

View from our house

Walking along one of the rolling hills in the Lagan Meadows

Atop Divis Mountain, with the city of Belfast behind us (more like a hill, though, compared to Colorado's mountains).  (4 months pregnant)

20 weeks pregnant

Right before my 1K Fun Run & Dave's Half Marathon
(33 weeks pregnant)

At the hospital, last pregnant picture

Daddy & Daughter


First family photo
 

Merry Christmas (complete with our paper crowns from our Christmas Crackers - a UK tradition)!