September 16, 2014

Monthly Musings with Marc - September

Welcome my awesome husband, Marc, to the blog! He will be posting monthly on his experiences in Europe, and my disclaimer is I will only sometimes add an introduction and edit for grammar and spelling. What you get is all Vilas! Enjoy!

What To Do, When To Do What,

and Who To Do What With


Life is a journey full of twists, turns, and forks in the road. When you're growing up, your parents help point you in the right direction, put a roof over your head, and tell you where you're supposed to be. If you are lucky enough to have siblings, then you have some company with you on your travels. Friends add to this, but if you have moved as much as I have, then friends come and go while adding to the experiences, but brothers and sisters are there from start to finish.

When you get married all of that changes.

Now you and your spouse have to make decisions on the path to take, how to handle the twists that come with those choices, and be prepared to make a turn when an opportunity presents itself.

For Christy and I, we have had two major directional decisions as husband and wife. Moving to Simpson University and moving to France. Both were tough decisions, but both were made with each other and both journeys strengthened our marriage and gave us many great experiences.

The journey to SU was a pretty easy one for me: I wanted to coach college basketball, period. The only thing I wasn't sure about was moving to NorCal. For Christy, it was different and multi-layered: she didn't want to teach high school, and she wasn't sure if she was qualified to be a college head coach, but wanted to live in NorCal. So we were looking at the situation from different sides of the spectrum. Ultimately, the athletic staff, namely Joe, Derrick, and Robin, made us comfortable and SU was such a beautiful campus we decided to take this path.


The second intense decision as a married couple came two years later: the decision to move to France. After spending our hearts and souls building the volleyball and basketball programs at SU it was time to move on. Christy, who was 25 at the time, missed playing and felt she had too many good years left in her body to sit on the sideline as a coach. She was right and I had to support that. This was a twist in my life journey as I was about to achieve a long-time goal and become a head coach at the college level.


Christy got herself in top-shelf shape and went off to Europe to see if she could get herself a job as a professional volleyball player.

After three months in Belgium she knew that was the life she wanted.

What did I want? I wanted my wife to be happy. When traveling on the road of marriage the words, "Happy wife equals happy life," are words to live by. Leaving the relationships, the players, and the coaching position at SU was going to be tough, but moving to Europe with Christy was the obvious decision.


Three years later that decision is even more obvious. Our marriage is even stronger; traveling together and living in small spaces helped this, and we love our life in France. God has added some twists and turns during our journey in France, but having a wife like Christy makes the journey that much sweeter.