Beginning on December 21, 2012, I am posting a daily encapsulation of the year’s finest attributes.
One year ago, I awoke for the first time in Southern California as my home. Though I was barely unpacked, with my wife and two cats in tow, I was giddy with the possibilities and challenges the coming new year would hold.
We had driven from Texas in our little Honda, with worldly possessions and said cats, and arrived in San Diego in the midst of pouring rain (really?) on the evening of December 17th, 2011. Our first home was in the guest room of a house built in the 80s. We slept on an air bed and used an old bookshelf for a dresser.
We found church by way of a garage sale and attended on our first Sunday in town. Nearly every family in this church actively homeschools their children. Both of us grew up homsechooled. Needless to say, we are an active part of the very same congregation here today.
The winter was the first one I spent without so much as a snowflake or gust of frigid wind. Born and raised in Ohio, I was accustomed to a windswept environment framed by the skeletal branches of hibernating trees. Instead, I was treated to a sometimes-rainy, mostly green winter with frequent trips to the beach.
In May, we moved out of our first home and I flew back to Ohio for a little gig shooting a feature. Bree house-sat at an apartment in L.A. and took care of the cats. When I returned, we searched for a new place to live and found one right down the street from our previous place. The day after we moved in, I was called in to interview at a natural foods grocer 3 blocks away, hired 2 hours later, and began work the very next day. Prayer works, people.
Over the next 7 months, we gathered stability as I worked and Bree managed the homestead. In August, our roommate left and we gained a new one, a dental assistant in-training who is also a Christian and a terrific person to boot. Together, we have gradually been turning our humble apartment into something that is more “furnished” and festive. We still have a long way to go, i.e. obtaining actual communal furniture, but we are very thankful for our home.
As the holidays descended I was initiated into a conversation about the possibility of filling a position at a local company doing some really incredible work. That conversation extended on for a couple months and culminated in a job offer, which I accepted on a Sunday morning with a handshake. Kind of crazy how these things transpire, but then again, looking back at 2012, I can say for sure that God has never been more obviously maneuvering in my life, before. It’s as though He’s planting flags all over my road map, saying, “I was there!”
I could go into plentiful detail about all the ways in which God showed up this past year, however I will save some of those stories for journals and future postings.
Stay tuned for my next post, 2012: The Year in [iPhone] Photographs.
Joel Manahan 