Tent Pegs Extended!

Diary of a Soon-to-be Daddy

This week, I thought I would foray back into my blog-writing and do this week’s blog. It’ll probably be a short one since I am writing this on my lunch break at work and have plenty of pressing government-y things to keep me busy today.

As most of you know by now, last week Mel and I moved apartments. We had been getting fed up with poor maintenance in our last place, the bad attitude espoused by the apartment’s management company and staff, the low standards they apparently set for everything, and the general disrepair and decrepitude the building and its inhabitants had been falling in to. We had been looking for new apartments for a few months but had found nothing that would suit our modest yet specific needs in our modest yet specific price range. We had almost given up hope and resigned ourselves to another year of broken laundry machines, cracked walls, and crack-addicted people, but the Lord in His infinite mercy had something up his sleeve. He wanted us to extend our tent pegs and He was about to show us how.

In late March, I was praying about Mel’s and my situation when the Lord took me to Isaiah 54. In it, he tells the Israelites to extend their tent pegs as He was about to expand them as a people and make their inhabitants fill the desolate cities of the earth after years of exile and suffering. The direction to this verse was definitely the Lord, as I had not been studying Isaiah at the time, nor had I done much study of it previously. However, the fact that my lengthy period of unemployment and underemployment prior to starting at Boeing last year had made me sometimes feel as the Israelites did whilst in exile – desperate, forlorn, and miserable made the verse hit close to home. But I had never seen this verse before within its context and so it was not something I would ordinarily turn to. In fact, I came to it in a rather roundabout way (I’ll give you the fuller story if you want, but not here). Needless to say, the instruction seemed pertinent. However, my skeptical mind began to dismiss it. “Ah, perhaps it’s a coincidence,” I thought. “I probably read this verse long ago and somehow my subconscious brought it to mind due to our current situation.” My skeptical mind, borne of years of liberal education and a relatively trying existence on this earth, had to have its rightful say. But I was sure of the Lord’s instruction. I knew it in my spirit and I felt that this was the push we needed to try again at the apartment hunt.

Just then, Mel burst into the spare room with a load of laundry. “The laundry machines on our floor, the eighth floor, and the tenth floor are mostly all broken,” she huffed. “We’ve got to move!”  That was all the confirmation I needed! When the laundry was done she went online and looked again for an apartment that we could afford. After only minutes of looking, she came across an apartment building literally right down the street from us that we could afford, was modern with modern amenities, and was something we could raise a kid or two in with not too much difficulty! We looked at it and knew that it was the place we were going to move to! All in one evening our apartment hunt had restarted, taken a turn for the better, and been basically completed!

Long story short, after that, we viewed a couple floor plans in person, picked one that we hadn’t seen that was available on May 31 when our then-current lease was up, hired some movers, got all packed up, and moved! The move went well; the movers didn’t try to convince me that my antique bookshelf “always had three legs instead of four” like the last movers did, and we are now getting settled in our new place.

The conclusion of our adoption is still a ways off, but we have taken an important step. We have moved from a living space that fits the needs of a married couple into a place that suits the needs of a family with a small kid. The Lord pointed the way, provided the means (my amazing new job and an apartment we could afford that we somehow had missed up until then) and gave us the strength and amazing friends helping out to get it done. The move now being out of the way, I am convinced, the Lord will keep His promise to give us descendants that will inhabit the desolate cities of the earth.