A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

A new chapter is here for the Olbinskis

// March 28th, 2010 // family

Date nights can be dangerous for Jina and myself.

Let me back up a bit. The last six months have been busy for me at work. This project I am working on has taken me to places like Springfield, Toronto, Salt Lake City, Portland, Corvallis and Las Vegas. Just in the past two months I was gone for almost two weeks in Salt Lake, only to come home on a weekend to help my sick wife rest by taking care of Lyla and doing whatever I could for both of them.

So two weekends ago, we finally were able to get a night off together, a Saturday, while Jina’s friend Kathy watched Lyla for us.

Little did we know it would be a life-changing date night.

A little backstory would be good. The church we used to go to was based out of Oklahoma and we were a church plant out here in Gilbert. We left that church back towards the latter half of 2009 because of a decision made by the main campus that essentially cut us off and set us adrift on our own. A bunch of us were hurt by that, friends left and we left as well.

The pastor of our local campus at the time, Brian, also left with his family and mentioned that he might be looking to start his own church in the Valley. He’s an amazing guy, Jina and I just loved him and his family, they were so supportive during our struggles to have a baby and we were anxious to see what they would do.

Well that took awhile. And finally when they decided that the church they wanted to start would be DOWNTOWN Phoenix, we figured that was it, time to find something in the East Valley. We just couldn’t do that drive all the time, especially with me already working down there and rising gas prices.

So we decided we’d join our friends going to a church called Mission a little northeast of us. That was a few months ago. But even when we made that decision, it didn’t seem to sit right. I personally felt restless…like this just wasn’t the place for us.

Flash back to the date night…we both sat down, had known for awhile we needed to talk about church and what was going on with that, and suddenly we had each come to the same conclusion:

We wanted to help Brian start his church (called Day Twelve, check it out!).

And to top it off…we figured it would be a heck of a lot easier if we just lived downtown.

Not too long ago, Brian and his wife Gina had invited some people to the house they are renting in the Willow District in downtown Phoenix. It was beautiful and the area around it amazing. There are some great places to live down there if you just look.

So that’s the big news. We’re packing up, selling the house and will find a place to rent downtown. Or somewhere around that neighborhood…we aren’t sure just where yet.

The biggest hurdle is selling the house of course. Those that are close friends and family know how upside down we are (like everyone really) and so we’re going to have to short sale it. That’s the main prayer right now…hoping that goes smoothly and that it will actually work.

This is big step for us obviously. We’ve been in our house for going on nine years now. We’ve been pretty content in our little corner of the world. Losing the house, moving 30 miles and renting…well that’s just something challenging for us.

I’m looking forward to this for so many reasons. The first is obviously being able to help start Day Twelve without the burden of driving such a far distance. The second is that I work downtown anyways, this could end up saving us close to $150-200 a month just on GAS.

We’re also going to look for a place to rent that is cheaper than our current monthly mortgage payment, which will save us more money there, and likely we’ll be saving in a few other places as well.

But it’s also just something new and different. Downtown, or the urban environment, will be such a change for us. Jina is particularly excited to have Lyla grow up with more diversity around her and I think that’s awesome too. And being part of this church is going to help us really see what is happening down there and allow us to help out in any way that God wants us to.

I will be posting more updates in the coming weeks about this, but I wanted to get this out there now. We’ve already told most of our family and our close friends in the past two weeks, but I know there are others that will want to know.

It’s definitely going to be tough…we have a lot of memories in this house. This photo is one of them…watching my two girls play in the living room…was a wonderful moment.