God's provision
My housing dilemma has been resolved. A friend called me this week to say that she and another girl had decided to rent a whole house and were looking for a third person to share with. Would I happen to be interested?
They've found a single storey house, unfurnished, which the landlady is renting out for $850 a month. After splitting the rental three ways, it's well within my budget.
I'm excited about this; I can't explain what it's like to simply rent a room - my room is my world. It's a self-contained, independent microcosm. Everything I could ever need is inside it. The rest of the house isn't exactly off-limits, but I tend to feel like an intruder there. Only the room is really mine.
When I get back at the end of the day, I go straight up to my room. There's no lingering in the living room, no unwinding and "How was your day?" chit-chat. This kind of detachment can be terribly isolating.
So now we're going to have a house. I'm hoping for this arrangement to be a long-term one; having moved seven times (yes, SEVEN! Your eyes deceive you not!) in as many years, I really really want to settle down. The nesting instinct has hit early. ;P
Yesterday afternoon, reading Gooddogbaddog's testimony of God's provision, I tried very hard not to think, "These kind of things never happen to me!"
While I can't deny I've seen God work miracles in my life, I don't remember seeing any come in the form of material provision. You read about missionaries getting cheques in the mail from anonymous donors at the eleventh hour - cheques for the exact amount required, right down to the last cent. Then you - I mean I - tell yourself, "But they're missionaries!" Hah. And I ain't no Hudson Taylor, no sir!
But this line of thinking just isn't true; God doesn't give anybody "VIP treatment"! "God does not show favourtism," Romans 2:11 tells us. And so He decided to show up the fallacy in my line of thought.
Having read Owen's blog that afternoon, I met up with Bob and his wife last night. We were talking about moving house - they, too, are moving into a new place at the end of the month of thereabouts - and I happened to mention that I would need to get a desk.
"We have a desk that we won't be bringing over to our new apartment," Bob's wife said. "If you want it, you can have it." Ooh. Then she mentioned that they would be getting a new washing machine. "The old one is really noisy," she told me. I asked what they were going to do with it. Send it to the junk heap, she informed me. I went, "Noooooo! Don't send it to the junk heap! I'll take it!!" Husband and wife looked at each other and were like, yeah, why not? "It still works fine," they assured me. "It's just noisy, that's all." Noisy I can live with. Anything is better than washing by hand! (You can tell I enjoy the comforts of life... *grin*)
Amazing. I now have a desk. And a washing machine. I still don't have a proper cupboard, but that's all right. I'm awed at God's provision anyway. :)