A Year In Haiku
Instead of sending out a Year End letter, we decided to create a haiku that summarized our year in a glance. "What's a haiku" you ask? It is a Japanese poem that doesn't rhyme and has a syllable scheme of 5-7-5. Here's our haiku (with explanation of each below):

Rent is now mortgage
Busy with work, church, and school
Car mileage is high

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Rent is now mortgage
Our biggest "news" for the year - We bought a house! After a process which began and ended with calls to our landlord, and exploring a handful of options in between, we were able to purchase the rental house we have been living in since moving to South Carolina. It is a fun, old mill house, one block off of the Pendleton Town Square. We've been learning more about the art of room painting, landscaping, and "getting rid" of mice. It would be fabulous to have you come test out our guest room!

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Busy with work, church, and school.
Each week dictates which of these aspects takes up the most of our time and how much we get to see each other. Work, church, and school all overlap for Luke at times. He is now the "worship intern" at Clemson Presbyterian Church. This year he completed the church's first worship CD - for which he played, sang, recorded, and engineered. He's enjoying being part of discussion about worship, planning and leading music for the evening services, playing music in morning services or doing sound when he's not playing...the list goes on... Every once in a while we get to sit with each other for an entire service. Sarah is enjoying getting to know many people and has been blessed with the opportunity to co-lead a women's Bible study.

As for school, Luke has reached the half-way point in working toward his Masters of Divinity degree at Erskine Seminary. He is doing very well in classes (receiving an award in the spring for Hebrew) and is thoroughly enjoying all that he is learning. In the summer, he traveled to New York City to take a course on the Christian Use of Art. In the fall, he began learning Greek and preached his first sermon in class.

Just before the 2006 New Year came, Sarah took a new position within the Cliffs Communities, a group of seven "master-planned golf and wellness communities" in the mountains of the western Carolinas. She is working as a sales assistant to one of the sales executives–Ross Kester. Sarah now has her Real Estate License and is learning the art of selling. The job is fun and stretching and provides many opportunities to meet many interesting people (at least on the phone) and do interesting things (helicopter tours and a James Taylor concert were a couple of highlights.

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Car mileage is high.

After driving from Seattle to South Carolina in 2005, we never thought we'd have another year like that one for putting miles on the car. Well, we were wrong! Work for Sarah and school for Luke put a steady amount of mileage on the cars. On top of that, we had a number of road trips for weddings, vacation, and family reunions, taking us to Florida, Mississippi, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee (and all the states in between).

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That's our year in a nutshell! We hope that you and your family are doing well this Christmas season and we look forward to hearing from you soon! Leaving a comment is a great way to do it :)