Saga: the Riddles’ move, Part I

Ok, so we have been trying to move to Cincinnati for the last month.  It has been quite a saga!  Let me fill you in.

WHY CINCINNATI?

Since most people have no idea why anyone would want to move FROM Boston TO Cincinnati (neither people here nor people there understand it), let’s just say that we have been wanting to move from Boston for some time now.  We really aren’t Bostonians.  We hate the weather, people are standoffish, and it is one of the most expensive places to raise a family.  Very quaint, and it has grown on us in many ways, but that’s no good reason to stay.

So, we looked at moving to Dallas about two years ago.  That was Plan A.  We did some work long-distance, for a pastor friend of ours whom we hoped to help when we relocated, but then he closed down his church in favor of parachurch (outside the local church) ministry.  So that plan fell through.  Fortunately, we were just having fun and not far into the planning stage, so no loss there.

Then, the option to move to Cincinnati came up.  This was Plan B.  Will had a Gordon-Conwell professor who was located there (teaching in Boston occasionally) and invited him to come visit.  Will and his friend Brad went about 18months ago and loved it.  The pastors they met out there were so welcoming.  It was just the kind of city they were looking to help… not too large, not too unwieldy, not too far away, not too unreached, not too churched, into mercy ministries, open to newcomers and new forms of help.  We had also considered other mid-size Eastern cities like Pittsburgh, Rochester, Indianapolis, etc.  But Cincinnati was the first city we actually got to visit, and we really liked it.  The Midwestern feel was also a nice adventure since we had already experienced South, New England, Florida, and Chesapeake.  (And we weren’t ready for the West

So we considered moving there for awhile until a very close friend of ours here wanted to come on board and encouraged us to stay in Boston and plant a church here instead.  This became Plan C.  We started drawing up plans to do that for about four months and got pretty far, but vision and ideals weren’t totally in line so that came to naught.  Disappointing but at least we didn’t get too far that it would have been upsetting.

So then we returned to Plan B.  Will and Brad took a second trip out there with some friends and even though it was almost a year later, they still loved it.  We have been exploring the possibility of starting a halfway house, a Christian drug addiction recovery program, in order to get a start in the city.  We have had lots of encouragement from our contacts there, so we’ll see.

First, we have to get there which is proving more difficult than we thought…