With the Fruit of Her Hands

God is so good. All the time.

I should probably start with a quick “we made it” post. It’s been almost a month now and I haven’t had the time to.

Our drive up was eventful, to say the least. Stephen’s dad went with us to drive the moving truck.

About three hours into our drive, there was an accident involving the moving truck. Dad and my two big boys were fine. The other car involved flipped across traffic into the median. The driver seemed to be ok, with only a few cuts on his arm and forehead. They took him to the hospital to check him out. What greatly burdens me is it’s been a month now, and we haven’t heard anything about how he’s doing. I pray he’s fine, and that he hasn’t had to fight insurance to get medical care he needed and the replacement car.

We got on the road in a much more somber mood, and made pretty much decent time after that, other than needing to stop a lot for the kids and dogs.

I finally called to book a hotel once we got into Pennsylvania. We took the only one in our price range that had open rooms for all of us. Oh. My. Word. It was so scary. The building was incredibly run down. I’ll just say that I was grateful to have the dogs in the rooms with us, because I wasn’t sure we’d still have our truck and trailer intact when we got up in the morning.

Come morning, we got back on the road and stopped for gas. We opened the trailer to get something out of the cooler, because we had put all the coolers and snacks in there. The door broke. Open. We had to call roadside assistance, which helped close the door, but didn’t fix it. We drove to find a Uhaul place to exchange the trailer, but the place we found couldn’t help us either. So we continued up the road, with the trailer broken shut now, and no access to our food.

We were thrilled to see the Hudson River and all the states we’d never seen before. Maine was especially thrilling for all of us. It is so incredibly breathtaking.

Once we got to the town where we’re staying, GPS said we had arrived, but we couldn’t find the house. It was 1am, and we were driving up and down the road in the dark trying to read house numbers to find it. We did, after an hour. Come to find out, we have zero cell reception in the area, so the closest GPS estimate had us six houses down.

The house we stayed at is called the Haven of Rest, and it truly was. It was a breath of fresh air to be able to relax in such a beautiful and quiet location. We still had a lot of running to do, but it was restful.

We got new phone numbers right away, since there’s so little reception in the county. After we closed on our new house and moved in, we discovered our house is a dead zone and even with a new carrier, our phones don’t get reception. So we got a land line phone right away too.

It has been a big adjustment getting used to driving an hour to church. After living in the Bible Belt for 18 years, it’s strange to have to go that far to find a Gospel preaching church.

What amazes me is the house we bought is directly across the street from our new church. What an incredible blessing.

We are working with another church an hour north of us. Their pastor has been driving down to ours to preach Sunday afternoons, between his own services. We are continuing that schedule for a few more weeks, while we canvas the town to let them know our church has a pastor now. We will have a big installation service October 5, and then we will go to traditional service times at that point.

It has been incredibly humbling to hear of all the people who have prayed for a pastor for our church over the past two years, but more humbling to realized God chose us to answer that need. It’s been a joy to get to know our members, who have become dear to us already. I’m very excited to see what God does next.