Texas!

Today @ 4 we are leaving for Texas and I can't wait! Alterna has been invited to attend a conference of Shalom Mission Communities. Shalom Mission Communities are a group of four intentional Christian communities. We are living in intentional Christian community both through Mission Year and Alterna. An intentional community can consist of people literally sharing a home and their things with one another. This describes our Mission Year lifestyle. Another type of intentional community is where families live in their own homes, but intentionally live near one another and participate in each others daily lives, through the sharing of meals, Bible studies, gardening... This type of community describes Alterna.

Mission requires that each house hold share at least one meal together a week. Alterna requires that we share two community meals with the Alterna community (plus others). We rotate and share both the cooking, cleaning, and host home each week. This has been a wonderful experience. I love the fact that we get to see each other so much during the week. Well, at least I am beginning to see the value in it. This was hard for me and I think our housemates at first. Before this year I didn't have much of a schedule as far as cooking, cleaning, or even actual meal times. Ben and I just ate and cleaned whenever. We have now started eating almost all our meals at 6:00. This is quite a change from eating dinner whenever we got around to it, sometimes not till 9:00. The intentionalityof our schedule forces us to plan ahead, something I am still learning.

Back to Texas, everyone attending this conference lives in some sort of intentional community. This will be a chance for us to learn how intentional communities really work, the up and downs.
I am really excited to lean more. The conference in Waco at Hope Fellowship. We will arrive in Tyler early early tomorrow morning and sleep at Grace OJ for a few hours. Then around 11 I believe we will have lunch at a share time with Grace staff and friends and families who are able to see us. I can't wait.