“Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.”
Hebrews 10:23 NLT.
Oh yes, we were certainly hanging onto Jesus as Gary and I were rushing to get things ready for our big move to Texas (Moving To … Texas?). A new adventure was coming!
Our house was on the market and we found someone to come clean our house once we were gone (phew!). We had way too much stuff to even think about bringing with us, so we decided we would just give a lot of our things away to friends.
The church small group we had been with for a couple of years blessed us immensely with a fun goodbye dinner at a local restaurant, and presented us with the newest book from pastor/author Max Lucado – oh yes, I love my books!
A kink came into our plans as the movers Gary’s company had contracted with couldn’t get to our house to pack our stuff until mid-November. That meant since Gary had to start working right away after we got settled in our apartment I was going to have to fly back home and deal with that. Well, God had taken care of everything so far so who was I to not trust Him now?
Another glitch is that I just couldn’t leave our cat Sparky behind. So, since we didn’t want to deal with traveling with him in the car, we boarded him in a kennel, and then when I came back to supervise the movers I would bring him with me to the airport and have him on the same flight to Dallas. Wasn’t really looking forward to doing that by myself!
As Gary and I started our drive from Oregon to Dallas, the first day wasn’t too fun. We got in a bad snowstorm in southern Oregon, and then got stuck behind 2 accidents. Definitely made us a little cranky, but there’s always a reason for everything, so we just decided we needed to do the best we could.
Then when we got near Sacramento the next day we got stuck behind another bad accident. Patience, patience…
We finally made it to Arizona to visit briefly with Jeffrey, and dropped off his spare power chair since he’d been having so many difficulties with his other one. Unfortunately we found out while we were there that Jeffrey had some health issues his caregivers were concerned about, and had an MRI scheduled in a few days. Definitely that put us on edge for awhile.
Until, however, we were reminded of Ephesians 3:20 (AMP):
“Now to Him Who, by (in consequence of) the [action of His] power that is at work within us, is able to [carry out His purpose and] do superabundantly, far over and above all that we [dare] ask or think [infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams] …”
Yes, God was in control so we needed to keep trusting.
Finally we arrived in the Dallas area – and it was HUGE!!! There were freeways running all over the place, and it seemed as though each city just ran into the next city. Definitely a little daunting. The Seattle area where we’d lived most of our lives before Oregon was small compared to all this!
Finally we made it to the nicely furnished apartment that Gary’s company had gotten for us. It was in a pretty development, but was just 1 bedroom. It had been a long time since we’d been cooped up in a small space like that for an extended period! Yet again we put it in the Lord’s hands. Our bedroom had a small nook that Gary set up his computer, and that turned into his office as well as our sleep space.
And the weather? It was warm! We certainly weren’t used to living a place where in November we could still wear short sleeved shirts. Back in Central Oregon it was starting to get really cold.
We got connected with the realtor Gary’s company had set us up with, and house-hunting started. However I still needed to fly back to Oregon and deal with the movers and the cat.
Was starting to do a lot of praying on that one…
The God Of All Comfort 