A Road Less Travelled

Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yes, when we last left our heroes they had just heard there was a house for them to move into and wait. They were very thankful.

Tuesday Seth and Crystal went to this house and plotted out where we were going to put all our junk. They came back and then promptly left again. Not their fault, but that’s another story. Wednesday I got to see the house. My first impression was that it’s small. My second impression was that it feels like somebody’s first house. There’s the first apartment which is always fun. Either it’s in a basement or only one of the outlets work or you have to go through a bedroom to get to the bathroom or you have to go through a bathroom to get to the bedroom. It’s a first apartment; it’s supposed to be broke. A first house feels similar to a first apartment. It’s got funny quirks and sometimes there are multiple doors into the basement for no reason. This house feels like a first house.

As you walk in, after you get past both finicky doors, you will come into a small, but pleasant living room. If you go left you will be in the master bedroom. It’s pink. I think that’s funny. If you stop going left and continue on through the living room you will come to a dining room our table might fit into. Don’t step on that square in the corner. I’m told you could fall through the floor. From where you stand you should be able to see right into the kitchen. Crystal has taken to calling it a kitchenette. I think it makes her feel better. It is small and red. Continuing on through the kitchen you get into something like a back hall. This is where the refrigerator is going. If you keep going you will come to a door and then if you walked down three very steep steps and turned left you will find yourself in another sort of back hallway. Take three steps forward and on your left you will find a way down into the basement and on your right you will find a door into the backyard. Now rewind back to the point where you were cautioned not to step on the funny looking square.

Now if you direct your attention to the northwest you will see a door. That is another way into the basement. Why they felt they needed two is quite beyond me. Please follow me past the door and here is a quaint little room painted a shade of green that should be forbidden. On the left wall are two doors. One of them leads into a closet and therefore nowhere and one of them leads into a bathroom a submarine designer could be proud of. There are two door letting into this bathroom. There is the one we are standing in and then the one across the way. That leads back into the master bedroom. Please back out of the bathroom with me and direct your attention to the wall across from us.

There is a doorway and two steps leading into a, um, well, it’s something like a back porch.  At least it’s the most logical place to put a back door I’ve ever seen. On three walls are windows and on the wall to your right is a door. This is my room. I will have three walls to my name and a roof. Yes, the walls in here have also been painted pink and so has the ceiling.  

Moving along and opening the door on our right you will not be quite sure what you are looking at. It’s like a combination closet and hallway, though it is far smaller than I make it out to be. Take one step inside, turn right and there you will find stairs. Now, I call them stairs, but please note that I do not call it a stairway. Stairway implies that there is room enough side-to-side for one to ascend the stairs reasonably comfortably. Not so with these stairs. They are narrower than the stairs we have now and that is saying a great deal. It’s as if the builders of the house realized they had wasted space elsewhere and decided to cut down just when they came to the stairs. Stairs go up, they said, or down. Who needs lots of room side-to-side? Please ascend these stairs with me. Notice the railing using up a good five inches or so. Notice the brown carpet on the stairs. Ah, we have reached the top.

Now I should explain that this house is being billed as a three bedroom house. It is not technically allowed to be so. For now you find yourself in a charming room with a slanted ceiling. If you turn to your right you will see a bathroom sink and then another pleasant room with a slanted ceiling. These rooms are more like one than they are like two. There is no door to denote the difference between the stairs, the one room or the other. It is fairly clear where the stairs end, but what of the rooms, we say. Oh, and I forgot to explain the bathroom sink. On your right, if you go through the doorway with no door, you will find a charming bathroom that was made for someone approximately four feet tall. In this bathroom is a toilet and a bathtub, but there the submarine designer was stymied as to where he should put the sink. Then he realized that all this room outside the bathroom was just sitting there. It wasn’t doing anything useful. So he put the sink right outside the door. In the room without the sink there are two crawlspaces. These crawl spaces are where we are putting all of the stuff we don’t want for the next two months.

There, ladies and gentlemen, is a tour of the house. We are calling the upstairs the Children’s Apartment and we are going to try to make it a fun place to be. It therefore flows that the downstairs be the Grown-up’s Apartment and such it is. Now, we were having trouble with what we were going to call this house in general. See, we have our old house, we have the house we will be moving into eventually and then there is this house. We were calling them the old house, the new house and the other new house, but that got confusing. So we have decided to call the house we will be living in for the next several months the Apartments. I hope you have enjoyed your tour. Thank you, come again.

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I just finished reading Ender’s Shadow (a parallel novel to Ender’s Game which I wrote about last February). While I enjoyed Ender’s Shadow at least as much as the first book I am not in the mood to analyze and explain why. Instead I will merely quote for you a couple of the parts that most resonated with me.

“He (Ender) walked down the corridor lined with his soldiers, who looked at him with love, with awe, with trust. Except Bean, who looked at him with anguish. Ender Wiggin was not larger than life, Bean knew. He was exactly life-sized, and so his larger-than-life burden was too much for him. And yet he was bearing it. So far.”

“I would carry some of it if I could, Bean said silently. Like I did today, you can turn it over to me and I’ll do it, if I can. You don’t have to do this alone.

Only even as he thought this, Bean knew it wasn’t true….Ender was was what Bean only wished to be–the kind of person on whom you could put all your hopes, who could carry all your fears, and he would not let you down, would not betray you.

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.

And then…he almost laughed as he thought, I don’t want to have to through what I’ve gone through to get here, either.”

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Well, folks today was one of those days. A co-worker of days long past (thank God) used to call days like today very days. Very up and very down.

So, today we had to scrub the house from top to middle and hide the fact that real, live people live here while still maintaining that homey touch. People and James were going to be showing up at 2 to look at the house and show the house respectively. We scrubbed and hid and then made a break for the door. We then went to the bank and I found out that I hadn’t read some very important fine print or at least hadn’t really understood one of those financial terms. Nothing bad, just not as good as I had expected. And then we went to Samaritan to eat lunch. As we were pulling in at around 2:40 we get a call from Seth who got a call from James who said that nobody showed. I was angry.

We sat down and ate lunch and started batting around different ideas for housing situations. Possibilities that were not immediately booed down included borrowing a Winnebago and parking it in front of the Lansberry residence, borrowing a cabin from someone somewhere, moving in with one of Seth’s coworkers who has a big house, seven children and uncertain water, the warehouse at Samaritan and a tent pitched in the Lansberry’s back yard. Jonathan was fairly sure his wife Carrie would kill him if he offered us his home, but he offered to let me move in with them. We agreed that would be a bad idea, though I appreciated the thought.

Crystal ended up leaving me and the children at Samaritan to come home and blow out a candle. While she was here making dinner to take back to Samaritan she looked into other housing possibilities. They were all variations on bad. My favorite was the place whose first question was about Crystal’s criminal history. And then she got a call. The people who lived two houses down from the Lansberry’s were willing to rent us their house. They promise not to sell it until we move, we are already on very good terms with them and the house comes with a washer and dryer. Of all the possibilities this house was my favorite. And God decided to give it to us. And we weren’t even supposed to hear back about it until tomorrow. So, tonight I can go to bed with a better certainty of where I will lay my head next week.

Hallelujah! Praise Jehovah! O, my soul, Jehovah praise! I will sing the glorious praises of my God through all my days!

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 So, there was this move scheduled for Saturday. Yes. Was. Brian the Seller does not have the work done on the house that he was supposed to and now he thinks it will take him to the end of August possibly the end of September. I have absolutely no idea what we are doing until then. But, you know what, I’m cool.

I will admit that I am at the stressed end of cool, but it is still cool nonetheless. And I have only one explanation for that. His name is God and I call it grace. My dad was talking about growth, but I disagree. Growth is when you are over time conformed to the image of God. Grace feels more like God just reaches down and flips the worry switch to ‘off’. Of course, you need grace to grow so don’t look at it too closely, but anyway, my fret switch got flipped to ‘off’.

It’s kinda funny sometimes, though, cause I look back and if we have to go somewhere and sort of hang in limbo I can see some really stupid looking bits of providence that would make it so much easier. For instance, I just recently purchased a piece of high-quality foam to use as a mattress. I wanted a bed I could roll up and put away when I wasn’t using it. So, I ordered this foam and it wasn’t supposed to come yet. But, lo and behold, it pops up in the mail on Thursday. It was supposed to take much longer than that, but now I have a bed I can lay out in, say, a dining room in a two bedroom apartment, sleep comfortably, and then pick up again in the morning. It feels like a really dumb thing to care about, but home is where your bed is and now my bed can travel and that makes me feel tons better. The best I can figure is God took it into His head to be extraordinarily good to me as usual. So I’ll say thank you and try to be prepared for whatever else He sends my way. And I’ll keep y’all posted. 

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  Tonight we ate dinner at the Lansberry’s fine abode. We ate Mutton’s Mush, salad and carrots and dip. At family worship we sang some hymns and I sang and listened and it made me glad. Jon, James and I heckled as Seth explained how to make a blog template to Raquel. Jon and Theresa wandered outside and looked at the garden and Raquel and I agreed on what picture we would want for our blog. Jeremy explained the difference in his mind between acceptable purple and cheesy purple. Kathey agreed to make salsa for Game Night tomorrow and Elsie lost a lens to her glasses. James plotted his next move in a new Diplomacy game and Noah wandered looking adorable. I looked around the table and felt very happy and very tired. I makes me feel a little bit better to think that the reason we are going through all this work and hassle is these friends and this family we have made ourselves into. It makes me feel a lot better especially when I feel so tired. Nine days left and counting!

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Um, you may have noticed that our blog template is different than it once was. I’ve noticed too. See, Raquel changed the template to the purplest template she could find in honor of July 19. Then somebody said she liked it better. Then we looked at it again and decided we didn’t really like the other one. But we both only kinda liked the Iris template (seriously, the gingham was not working for me) so we went looking for other templates and we found some that were okay and some that we kinda liked and one that we both really liked, but agreed didn’t suit this blog. So then we decided to just put the template back and deal with this issue when it wasn’t mumble o’clock at night. But then when we tried to put the old template back we found it was broke. And we didn’t know why. So, Iris it is until we can get our template act together. Enjoy.

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A haiku about growing up–

 

castles crumbling in the sand
their makers have left
to build castles of stone 

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Today is July 19th. Today is the Day of Purple. Three years ago today my mother put down her sorrows, her pains and her burdens and ran to be with her Father. Last year I took this day to remember my mother, but I will be honest and say that this year it just kinda snuck up on me. I haven’t been dreading this day and I am pretty sure it will go by like any other day. And I have decided I will not feel guilty or sad about this. I don’t feel like my heart is breaking. I don’t feel all the hurt of watching my mommy go away again. And that is a gift. That is not something to feel bad about. The Giver of all good gifts has seen fit to give me this day without pain. And so I will say Thank You and enjoy my gift. I will celebrate my mother’s new life by being happy and enjoying this day that the Lord has made. Please celebrate this day with me and be happy.

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Life has felt really heavy lately. Sometimes I feel a little lost. We went on our trip to Erie and when we left we had a house and a church. We got back and we don’t have a church anymore and we are constantly working on removing our presence from this house. We left full and we came back missing things.

We should be moving on Saturday the 29th. That day feels far away. And between here and there are all kinds of possibilities for the new house to fall through. I feel that weight on me. We are currently visiting a church, but we aren’t members there yet. That is not a good place to be and I can feel that weighing on me. Sometimes it just feel too heavy and I want to go lie down and hide from it all.

When we were visiting Erie I borrowed an album from my sister. It an album I used to love and haven’t listened to in years. There is a song on the album that is just perfect for the time.

STARING AT A BIRD:

I’m here staring at a bird in a tree
Lying still, only wishing he were me
‘Cause for a bird it’s not a crime
To try and satisfy his bird belly hunger
Or fly the blue belly sky

And from his bird’s eye view
He can pick and he can choose
He doesn’t have to grieve his spirit
No he doesn’t have to lose a moment’s joy there in his nest
No matter what his mess, and he can barrel out his chest
And he can fly away…

CHORUS:
But I’m pinned down in my bed again
I don’t think I could fly (I wouldn’t try)
If I was a bird I would be content
To peck along the ground
‘Cause I’m pinned down again…

I’m here staring at a bird on a limb
Lying still, only wishing I was him
‘Cause I could use a haven,
A nest above my fate
Call it a rest from the chasing of me pillow and my plate

And for a bird it’s always right to love his appetite
He’s too dumb to know the struggle, to weak to know the fight
He can fly south when he gets cold, sing until he’s old
And on a whim, he can unfold his wings
And fly away

CHORUS:
I’m here staring at a bird in the air
I wonder what I’d see if I looked down from there
I’d see a shattered temple, all it’s members in a sweat
Everyone’s been degraded, every sermon they forget

I’d see a man pulled from his bed by the same Hands of Love
That hung a cross around his neck
Just to remind him, remind him who he was…

CHORUS

The only reason I get up each morning is because God pulls me up every day. That is true across the board and not just when life gets heavy. The only reason I can get up and be happy in my day is because God reaches down from Heaven and picks me up and gives me joy. And since He’s shown up every day so far I can’t imagine He would ditch me now just when life feels heaviest. So I got up this morning and I shouldered the burden He gave me and I felt happy in my work. And tomorrow by His good grace I’ll do it again. Today has enough trouble I don’t need to go borrowing from tomorrow. And when tomorrow gets here so will a new measure of grace. There’s no need to fret and fuss. Even when life is heavy I can be joyful and I can be happy in the life God has gifted me. And so I will.

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 ”Don’t take hold of other people’s eyelids without permission.”

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