Dallas Bound

I am convinced that God has a sense of humor... For most of my life I often said that I never wanted to live in Los Angeles, and where does God send me a little over two years ago? The north end of Los Angeles! I have also often thought that I would never want to live in Texas...and where is God sending us? Dallas, Texas! The moral of this part of the story: never say never to God!

At the end of July (July 29, to be exact), we will be driving our Penske truck (I'll never use U-Haul again--if at all possible--after the bad experience that I had moving down here from Santa Rosa in 2005) after our morning service at Northridge Christian Church on our way to Dallas, Texas.


Allison has been hired by the Covenant Christian Academy (www.ccanet.org) in Colleyville, which is just west of the Dallas - Fort Worth Airport. I will be attending Dallas Theological Seminary (www.dts.edu), pursuing a ThM (Masters of Theology) degree in Bible Exposition / Biblical Counseling, which usually takes 4 years on a full-time basis...so who knows how long it will take me... I currently don't have a job lined up, but am praying that God will open the door for me minister somewhere...


There are a few primary motivations for the move:

1. We're convinced that seminary is a part of God's plan for me. I have always wanted to further my education, and now seems to be the time. When I moved down here to the San Fernando Valley, I had hoped to attend the Master's Seminary, but God closed that door.
2. Allison and I desire to start a family. If God should enable us to do that, our conviction and desire is that she would be a stay-at-home mom while the kids are young...and that's very difficult in the economy of the LA basin--especially on a youth pastor's salary...
   
3. We also desire to move from the renter category to the owner category. Tiny condos in ghetto neighborhoods of our current start at $300,000, and fixer-upper houses are closer to $500,000. That's well beyond our means. In the Dallas area, you can actually purchase a fixer-upper house for less than $50,000, and a decent home for under $100,000.

We do have a few friends in Dallas: my best friend, Matt Montgomery, and his family are in Dallas where Matt is attending Dallas Theological Seminary, and my former intern and good friend, Mike Baker and his wife Zoe, are living in Dallas while Mike is attending the seminary and serving as a youth pastor. A couple of friends from Allison's school also are living in the Dallas area.


We are excited about God's leading and following His calling, but we are saddened to be leaving our friends and ministries here. We'll also be considerably closer to Allison's family (her brother and sister-in-law and their kids are in St. Louis, and her parents live just north of Orlando, Florida, in a huge retirement community called The Villages), but will be considerably further away from my family (my parents live in a little town by Stockton, California called Rio Vista, and my brother lives in Sacramento).

We would greatly appreciate your prayers as we transition out of West Valley Christian School and Northridge Christian Church and make our way east at the end of July... Two specific requests are for our housing and for employment for me.

For His Glory,
Kevin & Allison Peterson