Moses and the Promised Land, or Finding a Home

This week is Vacation Bible School, so I signed up to help out.  About 150 kids come bouncing through the church door every morning.  Thank goodness for the energetic teenagers who volunteer too.  The theme this year is Wilderness Escape, and they talk about Moses leading the children of Israel from Egypt, through the Red Sea, and across the desert to the Promised Land.  The theme includes trusting in God, whether to provide or to lead.  The pastor gets to dress up as Moses, and carries around tablets of the Ten Commandments.  Charlton Heston has competition, in my opinion.

I’m new at Vacation Bible School. I never attended one before, nor helped at one.  There are lots of games, movies to watch, songs to sing, and new friends.  A little girl named Cayden told her mom after

the first day that it was the best three hours of her life.  One must not credit our Vacation Bible School too much.  Cayden has more charm than average.

My job was to serve in the Israel village, where there are crafts.  The kids get to make rope, sand art, sandals, tambourines, and “make bread” which is mostly “play with dough”.  My tent is the butter-making tent.  It’s pretty simple, we put cream in a small plastic bottle, the kids shake it for five minutes and voila!  Butter.  They can take a popsicle stick and put it on a Ritz cracker to sample their handiwork. Food in the wilderness!  We chat a bit about God’s provision.

I've had lots of wilderness experiences, from canoeing down a scary river in British Columbia (the Stikine) to facing a forest fire in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area.  

But the my Journey to the Promised Land, complete with manna from heaven and directionless wandering, came when I left a close knit extended family in a community I loved, and moved from Southern California to Seattle.

We had two daughters, age 3 and 1.  It was so nice living only six miles from Mom and Dad, as well as my two brothers.  We had a nice little house in a pretty little community, and a fenced backyard for the German Shepherd Dog.  I loved our church and I was in a babysitting co-op.  Perfect.

Then Hubby got a new job, and we had to move.  The job was a dream come true for him, but for the first year he would be on probation, making a mere $10,000 a year.  We had decided that I was going to be a stay-at-home mom, so we would live on our savings as well as a supplemental job he had with the US Naval Reserves.

Our plan was to rent a house in Seattle once we got there.  We thought we’d better take our furniture up there at the outset, for we did not know if Hubby would get any time off to come back down and move it north.  We rented a Ryder truck and towed our one car, a Pinto station wagon.  The Pinto decided he was not leaving So Cal, and put teeth in his protests by breaking down right before we even started off.  

No matter, we thought, we are towing the Pinto anyway!  He doesn’t have to work.  We planned to stop off at Hubby’s sister’s house on the way up.  Her husband was a mechanic.  We had the Ryder truck for a whole week, so we hoped Pinto could be easily fixed and we’d be on our way.

Unlike Moses and the Children of Israel, we did not have too many problems on the journey itself, other than making a tight turn and having the trailer hitch jam.  Hubby was whacking it to get it loose when some people came home and got upset we were blocking their driveway.  The owner yelled and griped at us, but Hubby and I spluttered our apologies, and he calmed down.  We were able to get the trailer hitch undone, rehooked, and got back on the road.

The mechanical brother-in-law fixed the Pinto station wagon, and we arrived in Seattle on a Sunday afternoon.  We had to have our belongings out of the truck by Tuesday evening, or would have to pay high fees. If we couldn’t find a house to rent by the day after tomorrow, and get all our stuff moved in, we would have to rent a storage unit.  It was money we didn’t have.

We were able to park the truck at the Ryder rental place, then simply drove to where Hubby would be working and found a nearby hotel.  We thought we’d start looking for rentals from there.  In those days, there was no Internet; we found places for rent in the classified section of the newspapers.  It was a beautiful July afternoon in Seattle, so we started driving around looking at neighborhoods.  It hit us that it might be rather daunting to find a place to live and be moved in in a mere 48 hours.  We needed to get crackin’ and find a place fast.

Whereupon, the Pinto decided he was having none of it and broke down again.  We didn’t even know where we were, only that there were a lot of trees and blackberry bushes around.  It looked like there might be some houses up ahead.  Hubby thought he could fix the Pinto if he could find an auto parts store.

We walked up the street, not really knowing where we were going, turned left, and two houses in, came upon a man sitting in his car, which was parked in his driveway.  He was listening to music.  We spoke to him through the open window and asked directions to the nearest auto parts store, explaining our car had broken down.

He said, “Hop in, I’ll take you there!”  We grinned.  When the first place did not have it, he took us to a second, and then back to our car, where he waited to make sure Hubby could get it fixed.  The man explained that his wife was ill with cancer, and that he got so bored sitting in the house while she napped.  He was out in the car listening to music and getting fresh air when we appeared.  Happy to help, he said.

There are angels among us.

Thankful for long summer evenings in Seattle, we were able to look at several rental houses that evening.  It boggled my mind how trashy people kept their places, expecting to be able to rent them.  A few were still occupied and would not be available for weeks.

Monday morning, I drove further afield, looking at neighborhoods.  I was used to Southern California’s style of homes, and the little old fashioned bungalows in Wallingford or Fremont were strange to me.  I headed south of the airport, and bought a local newspaper at an Albertson’s grocery store. 

By lunchtime, I had no leads.  I joined Hubby and his new hire mates for lunch on their first day of work.  None of them could believe that I would find a place, move all our goods, including the refrigerator, washer and dryer into the new house by myself, and have the rental truck back by the next day, Tuesday.

Nor could I, frankly. 

And that was assuming I would even find a place available, especially since I wanted a 3 bedroom with a fenced yard.  A CLEAN 3 bedroom with a fenced yard.

When Moses got to the Red Sea, he did not ask how many could build a boat, or how many could swim.  Probably none of them considered that the seas would part and they would walk across dry land.  It doesn’t say that they walked across damp sand or mucky low tide bogs.  Nope.  Dry land.

If this place was really going to be the perfect place, then it had to benefit the landlords too.  What kept going through my mind was “The place you seek is seeking you.  The place you need, needs you.”  My needs were going to be met by that very same God who could part the Red Sea.

In a local paper that afternoon I found a 5 bedroom place listed.  Cul de sac.  Nice place for little kids.  We made an appointment to go see it at 7PM, even though it was listed for a higher rent than our cut off.

When we arrived, waves of children came streaming out of neighborhood houses to gawk at us and inquire if we had any kids.  We did, so they decided we were worthy candidates.

The house was huge, clean and empty.  Five bedrooms, three bathrooms, big deck, big fenced yard backing up to a field.  We asked if the landlords would consider lowering the rent, explaining the probation and low pay of the first year on the job.  They asked what we could afford, and we weren’t too far off from what they wanted.  We agreed on a rent.

They explained that they HAD to get the place rented by Tuesday, for the landlady’s father was dying and she had to get to Michigan.  Could we come sign the lease the next morning?  They had been trying and trying to rent it.  I could not fathom it was still empty when I considered the other places listed.

Tuesday morning I signed the lease by myself along with my handy power of attorney.  The Pinto decided one last time to break down, this time evilly doing so right after a blind corner on a steep hill.  I could be killed, I pleaded with him.  He relented, started again, and up the hill we went.

However, how was I going to move all our things in?  I considered the Millionaire’s Club, where one hires luckless guys for odd jobs.  I rejected that idea, being a woman alone in a big house.

I called the Ryder truck place, and asked the woman at the desk if she might know anyone who I could hire.  Did she!  Yes!  Her son and his pal were just home from college and needed work.  If I could give them each $5/hr (this was in 1984), they’d be happy to unload me.  They’d even drive the truck down for me.

They worked hard.  We had a gaggle of giggly neighborhood children helping too, and by the time Hubby got home that Tuesday evening, we’d gotten everything in the house, and the truck was returned.

We lived in that house for four years, which was longer than anywhere else I had lived in my life, until we moved here.  We remodeled the kitchen with the landlord’s hearty approval, I planted things and made the garden pretty.  The landlord came over with gifts from time to time.

Today at Vacation Bible School I asked a kid if he thought that God would really provide or lead someone through the wilderness.  He said he guessed so.

I told him that he was right.  Impossible good comes true. 

I've seen dreams that move the mountains
Hope that doesn't ever end
Even when the sky is falling
And I've seen miracles just happen
Silent prayers get answered
Broken hearts become brand new
That's what faith can do.