Christmas letter


Greetings, Friends & Family!

We’re so excited to be sending you our first Christmas letter ever! Never having done this before, you’ll have to excuse us if it’s not up to par. We did try to wait until we had read some sample letters from all of you wonderful people ;)

Well our year started out in January, just like yours. It was cold and there was no snow. We took turns turning another year older - Steven first, then Rachel. Rachel had her wisdom teeth out so she celebrated her 21st birthday by eating jello from her Grammy. Over the next few months, Steven made many trips to WV with Stine consulting, the company he was doing temp work for. One chilly Tuesday night in April he took Rachel on a walk, sent a Chinese lantern into the sky, and asked her to marry him. She said, “Oh em gee, yes!” So they started planning a wedding. Not wanting to make finals in December more stressful than they had to be, they decided to commit their lives together in early August. So they spent the summer planning and buying things with Jeff-Dad’s credit card. Rachel spent the summer living with her Grammy and Gramps – well, sleeping there anyway. She wasn’t home much of the time between working in a human services home care facility, helping to fix up their future home, and spending time with her fiancé trying to plan a wedding. Steven spent his summer much the same way (with the exception of the human services job and the addition of a landscaping job). With a lot of help and support from family and friends they were able to pull off a beautiful wedding that brought the bride to tears (which then brought everyone else to tears as well). After the wedding the set off on an adventure to the Bahamas before coming back and learning how to settle back into life as a married couple.

Yes, we are loving married life. Somehow it’s already been 4.5 months. We’re still learning how to manage our time between our God, each other, our work/school, and those we love.  Yes, Rachel is still studying at Messiah. She will graduate May, 2013 with a double major in Spanish and Psychology with a counseling concentration. We’re also very involved in our church: coaches to the junior varsity quiz team, co-teaching the middle school Sunday school class, being youth leaders at Wednesday night youth group, and participating in the young adult group. We just took the membership class and will be inducted into the BIC family any Sunday now. In our free time we enjoy hiking up the trails at the end of our street, watching Castle or Cosby show episodes, having people over for dinner, listening to podcasts, and playing cards with parents and grandparents.
This has been a year of great change. We’ve learned a lot and grown a lot and plan to continue doing so in the years to come. God has blessed us richly as we’ve continued to trust in Him. His ways are higher and He already knows all of what’s ahead and all of what’s behind. Be blessed. And please invite yourselves over for dinner and games at our place if we don’t beat you to it!

Love, Steven and Rachel Miller

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