too much!

We're half way through the year and looking back so far at 2011, I'm pretty blown away by just how much has happened.

I thought, back in January and February, that the busyness of planning and preparing for marriage would be gone and done with after the wedding day in March. For a short time, it was. I got married in March and boy, we were so happy the day came and went relatively smoothly, thanks to the support of our most excellent wedding party.

But then in April, we had our second wedding banquet (highly unrecommended) in Toronto.

In May, I was asked to fly to Beijing to provide some training for my team there. A few days before leaving, I was told that I would be "promoted" to test lead to other features and so instead of just providing training to my team there, i also had to break it to them face to face that I would no longer be their manager. That was a bit awkward but a good learning experience for me. Then whisked back to Seattle to start my new responsibilities at work including passing off my old feature to another person to manage and picking up four new ones.

In June, we took a short "vacation" to LAX to help one of our groomsmen prepare for his wedding day. Work was so busy at this time for me, that I was on email constantly for the first half of the trip.

Now that we're back in Seattle, we've got a couple of weeks to slow down, rest up and re-energize and then it's back on a plane, this time to Europe for our honeymoon.

We go through weekends and all I can think of doing is sitting on a sofa, reading a book. Or taking a nap. Or sleeping in until 10am (which is completely abnormal for me as I usually wake up at 7am even on weekends). Or go for short walks for exercise. It's common for me to bump into someone in the elevator and to hear that I look awfully tired. Strangely, Hmma tells me the same happens to him. So what's going on here??

Part of this is our fault no doubt. We packed our lives and schedules with so many "things to do". But I wonder if part of this is also God stretching us and growing us through these opportunities. While all this is going on, I keep in the back of my head that if we live through these opportunities, conquer them and yet have neglected our new marriage or more importantly, neglected our relationship with God, then we've conquered nothing.

Please pray for me and Hmma that we would be intentional with our time such that we make time for God, for each other, and that we guard our time and calendars proactively and intensely as we continue to face many other things that are trying to suck up our time.