Thank You and See you Soon!

Rachel and I will be moving to Seattle soon! With this new beginning we want to embrace the change by focusing more on a joint blog. We feel that it would allow for both of us to write more and keep us in a shared experience. So thank you all for reading my rants, mostly in the beginning, and a few drifters over the past year or two. But please join us for the next part of our life over on our joint blog

Life with the Crouch's

May God bless you

Cheers,

Matt

What does it look like to rest?

Practicing a rhythm of rest is what we are trying to work through as a church community at Vox right now. I am excited for the conversations that Rachel and I will have about what that might look like in our lives and marriage. It will be important for us to be able to practice because the next few months are going to be pretty busy, or atleast have the potential to be. I havn't written a post about it yet but we are moving to Seattle towards the end of the summer and naturally moving and logistics involve a good bit of busy-ness, but we hope to not let it overwhelm and or overwork us. But we are extremely excited for the challenge and adventure ahead of us in the great Pacific Northwest! More to come on that later as well as an update about our learns involving rest.

Practice makes perfect

Writing is something you have to practice. This is something that I understand but have yet to put it to practice consistently. With this, as I have said with previous posts, I hope to start creating the habit. Discipline here I come!

Living Lives of Influence

Last week at Vox Veniae I was privileged to be able to speak/preach/teach during liturgy. The scripture was Matthew 5:13-16. Here is a link to the podcast. It was an awesome and very challenging process to craft the sermon. Hopefully I will have more opportunities to help serve in this way again.

A great way to start the day

My new morning routine is one that I am digging more and more everyday. For basically the past year I have spent the first several hours of my day with Rachel at Fair Bean Coffee. I still go with her to open in the morning, but I have to leave by 6:50 in order to have time to bike to the MetroRail on time for the train ride up north. I miss being able to be around her so much in the morning, but I think it is going to be good for us because a lot of the time we can't interact a whole lot after it starts getting busy and that can just lead to frustration for both of us. So this gives us some really good quality time in the first 45 or 5o minutes. It also allows me to have about an hour of time when I get to the Domain to read or catch up on something that I need to do on the computer before I go in to work. And the short bike rides I have to take before and after the train ride are amazing. I get to bike over town lake on S Congress birdge during the sunrise and I get to exit the train with a small troupe of bikers heading off to work. Definitely a great way to start the day.

Getting the itch...to CAMP!

The weather is changing and Rachel and I just sat around with a few of our roommates and shared stories, photos and videos of our past camping/backpacking experiences and now I am super inspired to go right now! Hopefully a trip can happen by the end of October!

Public Transportation is the best

We are very fortunate to have good and still progressing public transportation in Austin. Sharing one car and working in far different areas of town is all made possible by the combination of bikes, 1 car, car2go, buses and the MetroRail. From what I have been told and from what Ive experienced a little myself Austin still has a ways to go before it has as good public transportaion as other cities such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago, etc.. but Im grateful for what we have and for the direction the city is going.