When Aaron comes to town...

Hello friends,

My apologies for the awkward silence on the blog. Life got busy like it tends to do and I spent some time at home mostly unplugged.

Let's rewind and catch up on life for a minute.

The last couple weeks in Chicago were tough. Not all bad, but tough. I was very ready for a break.

This is difficult to write now that I'm about 2 weeks out of the situation and had some good refuel time back in KS, but I will just say that I felt incredibly broken. I felt discouraged like I'm not cut out for this stuff; like what I'm attempting to do doesn't really matter and won't make a difference.

 So, that was not particularly enjoyable. Yet I knew that there was hope. My big bro Aaron was coming in on Saturday for a couple days of fun in the city before we headed back home for the holidays. What do you know, I made it through the week and Aaron arrived on Saturday.

Billy and I rode down and met Aaron at Midway. Then we went straight to Gino's East for some famous Chicago deep dish pizza! After that, we went to the United Center to watch the Bulls dominate the Cleveland Cavaliers. It was a really fun game and the Bulls won with 100 points, which meant that we could get a free Big Mac at participating McDonald's locations within 48 hours of the game. We didn't have the opportunity to indulge, but it was still exciting.

Hannah joined us for dinner at Gino's!

MICHAEL JORDAN!! Our hero.

Sunday, Aaron and I went to church at both Soul City and next door at the Brethren church (with a pot luck afterwards!) and then went to Navy Pier. Winter Wonderfest was going on at the Pier, so we walked around there for a while which was fun! Then went to one of my favorite spots, a piano bar called Howl at the Moon. We hung out there for a really long time, enjoying lots of laughs and live music.

We did this mirror maze thing at Navy Pier. It was totally black but had really trippy red and green lazer lights! Totally gnarly.

It was such a blessing to have Aaron in town even for a short time. He’s been super encouraging throughout my YAV process, and always has good spiritual wisdom. It meant a lot that he took a couple days of his leave to come hang out with his clumsy little sis for a couple days. :)