Sunsets and Moonrises - Life in Maui

This is kind of a bittersweet blog for me. Bitter because we just learned today that we are having to move from this beautiful home by the end of the month - which can be kind of terrifying, since we have no place to move to!! But we came here with no home and God provided this one. The next one is just around the corner (either figuratively or literally)! We will miss this place dearly, but we know that God has better plans for us than we could ever imagine! The sweet part of this is that we are still living in a place that captures our hearts more and more!

One of the things we'll miss the most about this particular home is being able to take evening walks on the golf course. This is where we can watch the sunsets, sit and pray together and talk about things, and where we can run our nutty dog down the fairway (sometimes our nutty kids, too). The fragrance of the golf course in the evening is amazing - plumeria blended with the natural scrub that grows on the nearby hillside. Watching the sun fall into the ocean every evening is beyond words. Actually, though, we only see the actual ocean sunsets about the half of the year. During the winter months it sets behind Lana'i and in the summer, sneaks down behind Moloka'i. But during the late summer and early fall, and in the spring, we see some pretty awesome ocean-dipped suns - green flash and all!! Even though we won't be walking this golf course in the evening anymore, I'm sure that we'll find some place to watch sunsets...

Among the things that surprise us most is how much Don and I have fallen in love with...CLOUDS!! They come in all shapes and sizes here - long stretched out ones, tiny little puffy ones, enormous ominous ones. We can see them creeping through the West Maui Mountains from the side of our house that faces east. We can watch them pour out rain over the ocean and outer islands from the side of our house that faces west. They sprint along when the trade winds are strong, or they just stand over the islands and get taller. They make leis around the gentle slopes of Lana'i and the rugged peaks of Moloka'i. Yes, we love our clouds...

In this life, the thing that is center to it, is our worship life with the people of Calvary Chapel Westside. Little CCW became part of our lives more than five years ago, when we came as visitors. Greg was staying with us at our vacation condo, and he looked up the service times for this worship service at one of the nearby beach parks. It was whale season at the time, and I can remember thing that this guy had better be good since he was competing with honeymooning humpbacks. We pulled up, and to our surprise, instead of a couple of folks with a guitar and tambourine, we found a full-on amped up worship group singing the Chris Tomlin "How Great is Our God" AMEN!! How great, indeed. After awesome worship, we saw this not-too-tall guy in shorts and Hurley shirt, a bushy mop of black hair, and flip-flopped feet come up to the podium...and introduced himself as Pastor Steve Santos. And he held us in the palm of his hand for the next 90 minutes, preaching the Word, peppering in a lot of "gnarly's" and "radical's". We were hooked. In fact, that was the final - and most important - component to us making a life in Maui. Most of you know that we came from The Rock Church in San Diego, which is quite the mega-church. In it's unique way, CCW is even more mega than The Rock. We may have a tiny little church body, but our congregation on Sundays - especially at our beach service - is by and large visitors. We have people saved every week, and other Christians who are touched, who then in turn, take their experience to wherever they call home. That's big-time mega. And now we are blessed to not only call this our church home, we have so many new family members in this body of Christ. We have become especially close to that surfer-dude pastor, Steve, his wife Kim, and their two girls, Jen and Nikki. And toooo many others to name!

So, life is sweet, even if leaving this particular house is kind of painful. We're pretty excited to see the house the Lord has for us next!! In the meantime, we still have clouds to watch, crazy winds to blow through, birds to raise a rucus, fishies to swim amongst, and a Lord to praise!!