Well, it's officially 2008, 1:19 am. I am entering the New Year with a clean house and feeling quite proud of the ass-whooping I gave out tonight on Guitar Hero. Sorry Joey. And with a little self-control I am now enjoying the calm feeling after just one Mike's and thankfully avoided the distasterous three.
It's amazing what a year brings. Last year I spent New Year's Eve with extrememly mixed emotions. Thrilled to be out of a bad situation. Nervous about the fact that we were basically unemployed with a pretty hefty mortgage payment and no prospects. But God was faithful.
We put our house on the market. We didn't know where we were going but we knew we couldn't afford to stay where we were and the housing market was just starting to look a little scary so we knew it could take a while to sell. I wanted to move. Had to get out of this town. Had to leave behind all the crap we'd gone through in the last three years. Never wanted to look back. But then this nice guy named Matt Hanan came along and suddenly I realized that not all Christian leaders in this community sucked. (I was a bit jaded at the time.) And much to my surprise he took a major chance on Matt and gave him a part-time, temporary job at his church. They did it more to help us out then to help them. They didn't actually even need him at the time. I was amazed at how kind they were to us. It'd been a long time since I'd seen that kind of kindness in the church.
There was still the question of housing though. Between our jobs, we didn't make enough to own a home anymore and I planned to go back to school within a years time and we'd definitely not be able to afford to own a home then. The thought of living in an apartment again totally sucked. We'd have to get rid of a lot of junk. But again, God was faithful. Friends of ours had a house to rent and they were going to give us an amazing deal and even let us fix it up on their dime. Our home still wasn't selling. We weren't really even getting any decent bites. But we finally decided to commit to renting their house even if it meant using our savings and paying double for a little while. But again, God was faithful. We promised to start paying them in April. April was coming close and the house hadn't sold yet and we were getting nervous. But just in the right time, we got a good offer, accepted and closed just two weeks after we started paying on our new place.
Of course things were still up in the air. Matt wasn't promised a job at New Heights. We'd just see how things went for a couple of months. He kept working at Starbucks in the meantime. Come July, they offered him a full-time job and he accepted.
I was telling the New Heights staff wives that I finally feel like I'm coming around again, that God has been healing the ginormous hole in my heart and that He's used New Heights to do that. Cindy, our pastor's wife said that when we are hurt by the church, and it does happen, it's so important that we stick around and let God use the church to heal us too. I feel like I'm entering this New Year a lot less jaded, a lot less angry and finally believing again that God is actually good. See, I always believed God was good. I never doubted his incredible grace and his goodness. But the theology I was taught and that was demonstrated to me in the last few years was that God was a big bully just waiting to take my lunch money and if by chance I didn't have any lunch money to give, well I better watch out because hellfire was going to rain down on my house. And since I felt like hellfire had been raining down on my house for three years, I figured I must have seriously screwed up and God had walked away from me. Through the right teaching and love demonstrated at New Heights, I am remembering God for who He truly is, good and faithful.
I enter this New Year very different than last year. We still face some uncertainties as I wait to find out if I have been accepted into the Master in Teaching program at WSU and yeah, we're a little uncertain how the financial thing will work out when I quit my job to do that. But rather then worrying about it, I am trusting in God's perfect plan and believing that he is good and looking forward to the great things that will come in 2008.
