New Year, New Post

A friend's wife (and by extension, friend herself) wrote a comment to me as what I deemed a challenge to start blogging again. You can check out her challenge by clicking here. Essentially, it is a thirty day jaunt of reflecting over 2010 (while not being married to having to blog everyday).

Today's assignment: Describe the best moment, the one you really want to remember, from 2010. Paint a word picture and then share an actual picture.

I think that the easy thing to say would be, "The birth of our son." While this event is, undoubtedly, the most memorable and the best even that has happened to the Twilley's in 2010, I'm not going to write about this event (maybe some other time... but not right now).

The middle of the summer was burdensome by measure of heat. Philadelphia is a surprisingly hot city during the summer months. Sometimes, I check Birmingham's weather just so that I can reassure myself that even though we're 900 miles away from where we used to live, the temperature is still (at times) unbearably hot.

I wake up early because I'm used to waking up early for my job. My commute is easily one hour in the morning, many times more. In the afternoons, I am on the road for one and one half hours... sometimes two. As I said, sometimes I wake up early. When I do this on the weekends, I walk the dog so that I can come back and make breakfast for my wife and I. On Saturdays and Sundays, I find that I am strangely unfamiliar with my own neighborhood.

There is a depth of silence that is often yearned for (by some) yet seldom experienced. The silence with the warm morning air is strange and burdensome to me.

My own neighborhood is alien to me.

I worked for Allstate for nearly six years. There is so much that I learned from my experience there... so much that I gained and so much that I gave. But this day marked a new chapter for these Twilley's in Philly.

I walked in to the office. My desk was cleaner than it had been since I moved to Philadelphia (in honesty... it was cleaner; when I moved here there were actually tobacco stains in my desk drawers and on the desk itself). The office was a little different than when we moved here three years prior, but not by much. There were a few new faces, but work, gender and geography really always kept me from developing any sort of more meaningful relationship with many of the folks in the office.

I was actually asked if I could close any loose ends I had early (by noon) because the IT manager had planned on letting me leave earlier than expected (I think everyone else was off for the fourth of July).

June 29 was a weekday. It was also my last day working for Allstate Insurance Company.

June 30 was also a weekday... it was my first day as a full time student at Westminster Theological Seminary.

I had actually taken some night classes at the school and two distance courses during a time of heavy travel at work. I mention this only because being a student is not what made June 30 so momentous for me. What June 30, 2010 meant was that I could start being a neighbor. It meant that traveling to New England and various parts of Pennsylvania was no longer my M.O. It meant that my wife and I could really start focusing again on our marriage in ways that we haven't truly been able to over the course of the past three years. It meant that I could fall in love with my city again.

The ramifications behind this are multitudinous so that they would make this post beyond bearable in length. While working for Allstate was a great experience for me, at the end of the day it was no longer for me. Starting school full time meant a freedom for me that wasn't afforded through a life of long commutes and extended travel. Being a Wesminster student is not what makes all of this so great - it is more of the idea that I can finally live in the city where my home is... if that makes any sense.

I'm sure that more of those ramifications will come out in future posts... but this is enough for now.