OK – a new adventure awaited the Kennedy family: We were moving to a completely different state (Pulling Up Tent Stakes)!
This move had actually been a long time coming, and if I hadn’t been such a selfish brat about not wanting to move because of my comfortableness with having my family close by, as well as good friends and Jeffrey being firmly situated in his school, it would have come years ago. As I wrote in The Majestic Awesomeness of God, Gary had been having such a hard time living in our home in the Seattle area ever since we lost our 2 precious boys.
So now here we were – we had just sold our house! But wait a minute: It’s only April, and we weren’t planning on moving before summer break. It was going to be hard enough to get Jeffrey acclimated to a new school district at the beginning of a school year. Oh brother…
Yet God was faithful, and as we explained our situation to the new owners of our home, they kindly agreed that we could stay in the house until school got out. Yay!
We looked and looked online at homes, but as Memorial Day weekend approached, we figured we better high-tail it down to Central Oregon to see about finding somewhere to live.
Well that didn’t work, as when we got down there we couldn’t find any homes available in our price range that were half-way decent!
Once we got back home we got on the phone and madly tried to find a place to rent for 3 months. Ha! We couldn’t find anything, except if we wanted to pay for 6 months, which we couldn’t do. So why was it so difficult? Because the area was considered a “resort location” and it was summer!
Well, duh … why didn’t we think of that?
We were definitely starting to freak out. It was a weird feeling knowing soon that you’d basically be “homeless.”
Then a thought came flying into my head, which I know was from God…
When we had been down in the area over Memorial Day weekend, we had stayed at a nice hotel, where the manager really had a soft heart towards Jeffrey. Maybe we could call the manager and explain our predicament? Would he perhaps remember us?
Gary was a little hesitant, but quite frankly we were out of options. So he called, and wouldn’t you know the manager did indeed remember us, and ended up giving us a king suite with a great view for as long as we needed it – for only $89 a night! We were floored – what faithfulness from our Father!
When we finally got everything settled, our neighbors threw a great going-away BBQ for us, and we were really blessed by those who attended. We had been given such wonderful neighbors throughout our years living there.
When we finally arrived in Central Oregon, we had to unload all our stuff into a storage facility, and by that time tempers were really running short between Gary and I – why was he always so stubborn anyway? We eventually got to the hotel and settled into our temporary home for a few weeks.
How spoiled we were there! Every morning we got a free full breakfast which helped us save money, and our room had a little refrigerator and microwave in it so we didn’t have to eat out all the time. In addition to that, the main breakfast staff-person came alongside us and treated Jeffrey like royalty (yes, he definitely took advantage of it).
There was also a great workout facility, and a large swimming pool and hot-tub where we were able to take Jeffrey swimming and continue some of his therapies until we got him hooked up again.
And yum! Every evening they had fresh-baked cookies, which of course we took full advantage of. As a matter of fact, one evening we stayed up in our room, and all of a sudden a knock came at our door, which was one of the front desk staff-people hand-delivering us a fresh plate of them!
(However it didn’t take long for me to realize eating home-baked cookies all the time wasn’t at all good for my waistline. Yikes…)
Next began our earnest house searching. We had only a couple months before school started, and we really wanted to get moved into our home in time to get Jeffrey plugged into the new school he would be attending.
Would we find one?
The God Of All Comfort 