James & Carolanne

Dear Friends,

We have a decision to make that we would really like your prayer for us on. We have come to the realization that with a baby coming, we are going to need to move. This comes as a result of a couple different issues.

1. Our place is getting kinda small.
   We are realizing that our condo is going to become rather small with two adults, a largish dog, and a baby living in it. This is partly due to the fact that we really value our office space which would be completely lost if we made our current office into the baby's room. Storage space is also VERY limited (ie... we never had any) which will make storing things like strollers and other baby related items rather difficult.

2. Smoking related issues.
   This is the more serious issue from our perspective. It would seem that a number of the people around us, especially the person living below us, smoke heavily both inside and on the balconies of their condos. It has come to the point where at almost any hour of the day or night we can open our windows and have strong cigarette or marijuana smoke come wafting in. Also, most evenings the hallway to our place becomes hazy from both cigarette and marijuana smoke. And finally, due to one particular individual who smokes heavily indoors in the condo below ours, if we leave our windows closed for too long our entire condo begins to stink as though we ourselves had been smoking inside.

This is NOT healthy for either us or the baby and, as it seems that our strata management is unable to do anything about it in spite of our numerous complaints, we feel that we have no choice but to sell our condo and move.

Please pray for us as we begin this process, that the Lord would be guiding our steps and would bring us to the perfect place for us to live. We're thinking at this point we'll probably try to buy a townhouse, and we have a fairly large list of things that we are looking for. Among other things, we want it to be here in Abbotsford, allow pets and preferably have a fenced back-yard.

We would LOVE to actually buy our own house (as opposed to a town-house) but the prices of houses in Abbotsford are far beyond anything we could even hope to afford.

Anyway, the prayer request is that the Lord would give us both wisdom and guidance as we work our way through this process. We want to follow His leading and be good stewards of what He has blessed us with. We realize that we have been already richly blessed by the ability even to own our own place and we don't want to take that for granted. At the same time, we have to look at the reality of life and make our decisions accordingly.

Thank you for your prayers and concern in this matter,

Wishing you all the best,
James and Carolanne Warkentin