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The year 2012 has been a year of “firsts” for us.
As most of you know, we were married on March 3rd of this year and are blessed to report that each new day just gets better and better. 🙂 As a result of our wedding came many “firsts” — such as our first kiss, our first trip with just the two of us, and our first home.
God has blessed us with a beautiful and spacious apartment in a quiet part of Darien, IL, just minutes from work, church, and Aldi — our favorite place to shop. The neighbors are quiet and friendly and the view is lovely. We even have a nice park in our “backyard” which is nice when little friends come to visit.
During our engagement, the Lord provided us with our first few pieces of furniture through friends at church and local Craigslist listings. The Lord even provided us with a really nice mattress for our bed at an incredible discount! So, as a result, we started our home with a couch, a desk, a bed, and a dining room set as our first pieces of furniture. Over the last nine months, the Lord has seen fit to fill in the “missing pieces” and our home is now fully furnished and ready for visitors like you…even on short notice. 🙂
Our first trip as a married couple (after our honeymoon, of course) was to Wisconsin for the wedding of Valerie’s younger brother. It has been a busy year of weddings for us as we have attended well over half a dozen of them together, including the weddings of three of our own siblings. It has been neat to hear the stories of so many other young couples and how God has brought them together.
This summer, we enjoyed having our first overnight guests and have truly enjoyed opening our home to family and friends and sharing the gift of hospitality.
Also this summer, Valerie enjoyed her first opportunity to visit the Waller farms as well as her first Waller family reunion (well, technically it was a Perhai family reunion but that’s part of the Waller extended family).
In September, Adam had his first business trip after the wedding…and Valerie was privileged to get to go along too! 🙂
This fall, we have even been able to work on our first web development project together which has been a lot of fun. It has been so neat to see how much our interests overlap and yet our personal areas of gifting complement each other’s weaknesses!
We just finished celebrating our first Thanksgiving together as a married couple and are greatly looking forward to our first Christmas together as well. We have been truly blessed in this our first year of marriage. While we don’t know exactly what this next year holds, we look forward to it in eager anticipation, knowing that our loving Heavenly Father delights to give us His best.
Even as we look back on that first Christmas night, we see God giving mankind the gift of His very best when He sent His very own Son — His only Son — to come to this earth to live, to die, and to rise again so that our sins could be eternally forgiven and we could live with Him in heaven as His adopted children.
Whether this next year is a year of “firsts” or “lasts” or just the normal “status quo” for you, God’s gift is still available to you for He longs to receive you as His child and pour out His blessings upon you as well.
As we exchange gifts with one another and engage in the many holiday festivities, may we be ever mindful of God’s greatest gift to us — His Son, Jesus Christ.
Merry Christmas and God bless you in the coming year!
~ Adam & Valerie Waller