We bought a house!
It’s on the west side of Bloomington, about five minutes from Trinity Reformed Church. There are eleven of us in the Weeks family now, and we are thrilled at the thought of a bit more space for everyone. We love the location, and we’ve already begun to know our future neighbors. We move on Saturday, May 2nd. If you’re able to help, shoot me a text or email to let me know!
Obviously, this means we are planning to stay here in Bloomington.
It has been almost a year since I last posted, and what a year it has been. In the last twelve months:
I quit my job without knowing what would come next.
I decided to work as a freelance web developer. I’ve spent every spare minute trying to come up to speed as fast as possible.
We thought we were going to move but then didn’t.
Our three oldest children started at a new school.
We had baby #9 in October.
Miraculously, I’ve had paying work the entire time.
And now… we’re moving!
We’ve been busy.
Hannah and I became convinced late in the fall of 2024 that I needed to resign my position at Trinity Reformed Church. But if you quit your job, you need a plan. Right? We had no idea what we would do next. That December, Hannah had the idea that we could move to Evansville. Our reasons were:
There’s a church down there with people we know and love
It’s not too far from Bloomington
It’s in the state of Indiana - important for all the support we get from the state for Mary’s care
There’s a Christian school down there our kids could attend
Neither of us thought Evansville was going to be our “forever” destination. We thought we could be there for a couple years while we figured out what to do next. But it felt like we were starting a new life, and aren’t you supposed to move when you do that? We figured we had to go somewhere.
Somehow, the thought of moving to Evansville made quitting my job feel more possible. It was all pure speculation, and none of it worked in the long run. But it was enough to give us the confidence to take the next step. Life is funny.
Immediately after the Christmas holidays, in January 2025, I told Jody that I intended to resign my position at Trinity Reformed Church. With the cat out of the bag, many things started to happen quickly. We informed the congregation in February, I was relieved of almost all of my duties by the end of April, and I was relieved of all of my duties by the end of May.
It took those months for me and Hannah to make two important decisions. We weren’t going to try and look for another pastorate, and we weren’t going to be moving anywhere in 2025. Both of those decisions came with very mixed emotions. As I’ve said recently, I love software development. If I could have a hobby, writing code and building stuff would be it. But the church has my heart. My appreciation for our church and the men who lead her has only grown in these past months.
So we’re staying in Bloomington. We plan to continue attending Trinity Reformed Church. I don’t know what the future holds as far as ministry, but right now I’m focused on my freelance software development work.
If you know someone who needs a freelance web developer, let them know I’m available for hire! I’m always looking for work, and I’d be very grateful for a reference. And if you’d like me to build you an awesome web app, get in touch!!
As for software development… wow. What a ride. Last May, after we had decided to stay in Bloomington, I put a schedule together for myself and sent it to Hannah. I realized that I only had 3-4 months before we’d have a new baby. The pressure of a new baby is intense, and so I needed to learn and grow as much as possible in that time as a software developer. So that summer I worked… a lot. I would go in early and start the day by spending a few hours reading, learning, and practicing what I learned. Then, typically in the afternoon, I would work on projects for paying clients.
I started the habit of journaling regularly about what I was learning and working on, and I found out that it is a common practice for engineers. There are many tools and methods for doing web development work, and it was confusing and overwhelming at the start - even for a guy who had done it before! Here’s an excerpt from one of my journals dated July 12, 2025:
It’s helpful to remember that at the bottom of all the frameworks and libraries and systems available for frontend development, all web apps are just a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the end. That’s it. It’s just a question of how you get there.
And what a winding road it is to get there.
There are so many overlapping and conflicting ways to handle frontend development. It is truly astonishing. I’ve been trying for months now to figure out which tools I should learn. They represent a huge investment of time and energy, and so I’ve tried to be smart about it.
I go on in that post to explain why I chose to learn React, Tailwind and Shadcn for frontend development. I think React was a big win. It has exploded in popularity since Facebook released it 10 years ago, and I think it will continue to grow. Building a user interface is really hard, and React is the least bad option that allows you to do that across all the major platforms. As for Tailwind and Shadcn - I’m still using them, but I could take them or leave them. I don’t think they’ll have as much staying power as React.
The impact of AI deserves its own post. Perhaps I’ll write about that sometime in the next 12 months… ;-)
I’m so grateful for the organizations that have given me work this past year. It’s been a lot like a good martini: one part mystery and two parts miracle. How could I have ever dared to hope we would be where we are now?
God is good.