Last Saturday we flew up to Portland Airport and picked up our rental car and traveled down to Salem Oregon. We celebrated resurrection Sunday with our friends at Freedom Friends Church. Freedom Friends is the semi-programmed meeting I am doing ethnographic research on for my fifth tutorial. It have been thinking about Freedom Friends for some time and it was great to finally worship with them.
On Monday and Tuesday we did a crash course house hunt in Camas. On Monday we had a friend from our new meeting as our person GPS and Tuesday, knowing the area a little better, we saw a couple more houses and made a decision on where we will be living. We found a really nice 3 bedroom townhouse that has a little back yard, a garage, and is only one mile from the meetinghouse. During this time we also got to stay with a family from our meeting which was great for getting to know them better. We also had had dinner and breakfast with a couple other friends from the church. Having these couple days to hang out in Camas enabled us to start building some relationships and left us feeling really excited about the move.
Now we’re in Rockaway Beach Oregon staying at a beach house working out the Quaker youth book project. It’s really great seeing all the other folks on the editorial board (there are ten of us) and it’s been a lot of fun to work together through these 300 submissions from this book. There is a lot of energy around this book and we all feel that the final product will be a true gift to the Quaker community. We have a few more days of work to do on the book and then on Monday everyone, including my wife and daughter will be heading back home or moving onto their next stop. However, I will be staying at the Friends camp here in Rockaway for the next week to attend my first Northwest Friends pastors’ conference. I look forward to getting to know my new colleagues.