Cool Hand Luke

This weekend my wife and I moved into a new house not too far from where we were already living. We basically moved from a kind of dumpy house in a nice neighborhood to a kind of nice house in a dumpy neighborhood. Our old house didn’t have central heat or air, and we were always freezing. The kitchen was slightly bigger than an armpit. We had literally no counter. We had to cut vegetables on our washer, which also doubled as the surface that we kept all of our small appliances on. This was problematic when we actually wanted to wash our clothes.

Our new house has more space, it has kitchen counters, and it has heat. All of these are amazing and we fill like we’re filthy rich now even though the rent is the same. Moving has been exhausting, though. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to move before but the fact is, moving basically sucks. You have to ask everyone you know if they have boxes you can use. You spend days packing up all your stuff, finding things you had forgotten about, and wondering where it all came from. You agonize over whether you want to part with your trinkets or lug them into your new dwelling. Then you have to load all the boxes into a car/moving van/other automobile along with all your awkward-shaped furniture. Sometimes you have to take several trips. It’s heavy, tiring work. Then you unload it and your house is full of boxes. You don’t know where to even start and you feel overwhelmed by the work that is ahead of you. It can take weeks to sort all of this out.

Something hit me in the midst of all of this: I would not be in the middle of this “burden” if I wasn’t extremely blessed. We have so much stuff that it takes multiple trips in the van to move it all, and it fills an entire house. Most of this was given to us when we got married; just given to us. All we did was point a scan gun at stuff we liked in Target and we got a lot of it. We’re moving into a bigger, nice, warmer house just because we can. And about ten people from our church along with our parents helped us knock the bulk of it out in two days. We are exceedingly blessed beyond anything we could ask for and certainly beyond anything we deserve.

In light of hundreds of thousands of Haitians living without homes, in light of my baby nephew lying in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of his arms and legs, in light of poverty, disease, death, and the physical and emotional suffering perpetually plaguing mankind on a global level, and especially in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

I hope that you’ll find you have nothing to complain about either. But if you find yourself being one of the millions of people who are suffering from loss, heartache, sickness, or confusion, I hope you know that our God is good. I hope you know that He is in this with you. I hope you know that He is for you. I hope you know that He will not abandon you.

Zephaniah 3:17