It is what it is. It is not good to make an excuse for my lack of posting. So much has happened. I was in a period of time where my son and I were actively praying for a house. I learned so much during that period. There was a lot of humbling when I had to ask people if they would consider donating the house that they wanted to sell to a nobody man and his son who really didn’t seem to anything but needy. We weren’t changing the world on a shoestring. We couldn’t promise anything with a good conscience. Nobody knew us. Honestly it felt a lot like nobody cared.
I did have a friend who was sufficiently wealthy to have bought a reasonable house for us and probably the cost would have gotten lost in the ups and downs of his other investments. What happened was that he knew the mortgage and banking industry regulations really well and tried to help me chart the best path through them. But I was in my late 60s, and I really didn’t want to get a 30 year mortgage that would require payments all the way into my late 90s. At the end of my conversation, the Lord broke in and said he (my friend) was giving you his best. And that really helped me from there on out and not just with regard to the house.
“Best’ is a term that really is dependent on the person who is offering it. The person who is receiving “the best” may have a completely different opinion . This is best understood through the concept of bounded rationality . Nobel laureate Herbert Simon popularized the idea of bounded rationality. Paraphrasing, he said that whatever people were doing, it made sense to them. They may not know as much as someone else. They may not have considered things that others would have considered. But they had bounds or limits on what they used for rationality, to determine what is “reality”. And so what I saw was that the bounded rationality of a lot of people included giving people their best. But that didn’t necessarily match what I would give to someone like me if I was in their shoes. Basically God was teaching me how to extend grace to the other person, but also in a very big way to myself when my bounds on rationality don’t match the Lords boundless rationality.
So I may go back and fill in the details, but the bottom line was a friend that my son made online posted a Zillow ad for an offseason Airbnb rental in a state that I had never been to, and didn’t know anyone in. It was absolutely beautiful. It was on a lake. It was in the midst of a beautiful area, in a beautiful state, that had a huge amount of public use land, and a lot of beautiful lakes. My son who was against renting someplace else, who wanted a place to really call home, ask me what I thought. I noticed the shift, and wondered if the Lord Jesus was behind the shift. I knew that my son and I both seemed to thrive more in the outdoors, and there were plenty of opportunities to do that in the state of Wisconsin. But it was only 900 miles away. And we had 20 years of accumulation crammed into our apartment and a couple of storage units. And this was an offseason rental, so we would have to move again in seven months. It was also fully furnished, so the Furnishings that we wanted to keep had to go into storage until we knew where we were finally going to land. And as one friend ended up putting it to me, if she was to rank all of her friends from the first to the last as to who might just up and move a significant distance away, I would have been dead last.
But the Lord opened the doors, which was part of my way of seeing how much the Lord was in this. My employer allowed me to go fully remote. Funds became available. And friends came in to support me in the packing up, the getting rid of, and the donating of what we had. It was a miracle.
One other detail. The week before the Zillow ad showed up in a twitter feed that my son followed, an online acquaintance of mine, Bobby, followed the direction of the Lord to come for a visit, at his own expense. It was a pure gift. I arranged For an Airbnb for him to stay at , primarily because I was so ashamed of the clutter and disorganization of our apartment. But the Lord wanted to bust some shame in me. So as things worked out, we needed to stop by the apartment, and acquaintance, sent by God, saw our apartment. That weekend he would say that although it looked in some ways like a hoarder’s apartment, what he saw in it was someone who was a displaced person. That was gracious to be sure, but also accurate. However that can give you an idea of the task of sorting that was to come for an unexpected move 900 miles away.
When I got up each day because I knew that a friend was going to ask me shortly after they got there “What is the plan?” And honestly the move took me by such surprise that I had no plan. The clutter and disorganization alone would have pulverized any plan. But the Lord had a plan. He ended up connecting me with a couple of movers through a friend in an apartment on the 2nd floor, who was also moving about the same time. They were not intimidate, and could really move things. So all I had to do was to tell them whether it was going to Wisconsin with us, going to storage, going in the dumpster, or going to a donation site. They handled it. They packed things, Them into the trucks. They also connected me with people who did a reasonable job of cleaning the apartment after things were out. And a big thing before they started all of that was we had a professional organizer who came and helped us with setting up a tagging system to direct the people who were doing the Packing and loading. She also ask a lot of clarifying questions so that we would arrive at the offseason Airbnb with what we needed
At the risk of fast forwarding, We made the decision to stay. We retrieved the things from the storage units, and brought them to Wisconsin. My son ended up finding a church locally where people were honest and not hypocritical. They were vulnerable, and human. And they had some of the same desires to draw closer to God as he did. He got to know a single mom and her children at the church. Now they’re married. And God has provided a home.
I have revived this blog because it will be useful as I do some more detailed, truly day by day blogging about what God is doing as I pursue the completion of the Catalyst course at the Identity Exchange (website and YouTube channel) in preparation for my retirement.
Jesus Day by Day 