Roller Coaster Ride and Blessings (Part 3)

If you're just joining me in this journey...you can catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 here.

In the last episode, all our plans had fallen through. We were just a few weeks from the new school year beginning, and days from needing to be out of our rental, and we hadn't even found a new place to live.

We prayed, and checked out a few rentals in the paper.

I actually cried that night. The houses we'ed gone out to look at in our maximum price range? Hovels.

As in bags of trash piled against the house, cockroach-on-the-counter hovels.

With little red clusters in those neighborhoods when I checked the addresses out on a sex offender registry site.

Not knowing what our future entailed, or how long we'd be stuck there, we waited.

It got down to the 11th hour.

We had to move our stuff into storage, and move in with my mother-in-law temporarily.

In desperation, we asked our former property management company if they had any new rentals on the list in our price range.

The gals in the office there really liked us (always paying rent on time goes a long way towards good landlord/renter relations).

She glanced from her desk across the room at the other lady, an unspoken message passing between them.

Opening her desk drawer, she pulled out a listing that they seemed to be holding back from the rest.

She took us to see it right away.

It was beautiful.

A brand new house, never before been lived in.

The situation was a definite answer to prayer.

And we immediately rented the place, even though we couldn't move in for two more weeks.

So, with the pressing needs of both a source of income and housing taken care of, we felt suddenly carefree.

Knowing we'd have our work cut out for us moving into the new place in just a couple of weeks, and having not had much of a 'vacation' during our summer break, we did what any insane normal family would do and took off on a long, meandering and much needed vacation to Tahoe and then west into Northern California, down the Mendocino Coast, to Hearst Castle, and eventually back home.

We had no itinerary. Just a truck loaded with camping gear and a desire for some R&R.

We spent considerable time praying along the way about our future, what it was that the Lord had in store for us back in the desert.

It was a wonderful trip, and one of the most memorable of all our family vacations to date.

We came back completely refreshed.

And that was about the time the Lord revealed to us at least a couple of the reasons that He had kept us where we were...