Back In The Olden Days

This past week the last part of Ephesians 3 has been on my mind. The beyond, infinitely more, than we can ask or think but the verses before those words have meant much more in these days. Those verses of how high, wide, deep and long the love of God is...the verses sometimes we can minimize or skip cause we want to get to the beyond our finite minds to the infinite of God's ability and power as it pertains to us or to the ones we love. Or at least that is how it worked for so long personally.  While reading this morning, I found myself back in Ephesians 3. And who knows why but my thoughts drifted to a time long ago and really not thought about too much.

When Roy and I got married, came home from our honeymoon to that small, dark, apartment Roy lived in, we came home to a mixed bag of surprises. Before getting home we had stopped at the savings and loan to close out the account that paid the wedding expenses. Surprise, the meager amount of money left in the account, was gone, so was the account. Closed by my father. Once again he had reneged on his promise that any leftover money was mine. We were counting on that $100.00 to get us through the next two weeks. Roy would be starting a new job and that $100.00 was our food and expense money. This is back in the day when you got a check, deposited it and waited a couple of days for the funds to be good. With this dismal news we returned to the apartment that was to be our home for only a few more weeks because we were moving to the Galleria area for Roy to be closer to his job. While we tried to figure out how we would buy groceries, we went to the kitchen to assess what we had for our food options and how we could stretch them. Roy was notorious about keeping it lean in life and believe me, the kitchen pickings were going to be lean...except...they weren't. Friends had the apartment manager open the apartment while we were on our honeymoon and they had stocked our kitchen with essentials as well as some fun, special kind of treat options. That my friends is above and beyond, more than we could ask or think of God for that moment in time. What had been meant as evil turned out for good. Several days later, my father called and asked what in the world were we going to do for food the next few weeks. Beware of questions being asked by someone who knows the answer...without even giving reference to what he had done, I happily told him of our good fortune of having friends who thought outside the box for wedding gifts. 

The apartment we moved to was probably more apartment than we needed. It was a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment with a front and back door. We had a fenced in front patio that had a small flowerbed ready to be filled. We had sold my car right after moving because Roy could take the bus down Westheimer to go to the office. In retrospect, we should have sold Roy's car cause that thing was nothing but a money grabbing expense. He had a Toranado and the garage guy told us they should have named the car a Tornado because it caused a storm though checking accounts. We moved into the new apartment with our third hand living room furniture we bought from a co-worker moving away, a queen sized bed, the kitchenette set I had bought when I moved into an apartment after college, bookshelves made of cinder block and 2x4s, and this big old heavy gray metal desk of Roy's. Oh, we also had Roy's portable broken down only one channel needed a wire hanger as an antennae TV, a bar stool and a kitchen knife. Thank goodness our wedding gifts filled out our beginning life nicely. We loved having that backdoor because taking groceries into the kitchen wasn't much of a chore. One of the bathrooms had a huge linen closet, only we couldn't use it because it had carpenter ants in it...no they were not singing Close to You. Told apartment maintenance about it, they would drop by, spray the closet...didn't affect those ants in anyway. Roy and I had just heard a sermon on Psalm 91. I also remember in college, a friend of a friend needed a place to spend the night in San Marcos, so I offered the empty bed in my room since the roommate spent the nights with her boyfriend. She only spent one night there the whole semester. I don't remember the girl's name that stayed the night but I do remember her telling me that if you only memorized one passage of scripture, memorize Psalm 91. It covered everything, for anytime, any trouble. Back to our linen closet. Every morning after Roy left for the office, I would take my Bible into that bathroom, ask the ants if they were listening to me, I'd kick the door, cause that is where they were working, and once kicked you could hear the rattle of those ants falling. I did this every morning for months, kicked the door and read Psalm 91 to them cause when it got to pestilence, I told them they couldn't live in the linen closet anymore cause the Word of God said, they could not come nigh my dwelling. One Sunday night Roy and I came home from church and that bathroom was covered in carpenter ants.There were hundreds of ants and none of them left the bathroom except by death. Roy began to kill them and I went and got bug spray from the kitchen. Back then I didn't know that pestilence meant sickness or disease. I thought it meant bugs and vermin...cause of thinking of the usage of pest control. God answered His Word, the ants were gone and we were finally able to use the linen closet. That is almost a memory that is forty three years old but always a good reminder that I prayed the Word, asked and sought God...He answered....above and beyond. But it was experiencing God's love in that adventure. I know I had experienced it before and continue to in these days...oh the deep deep love of Jesus.

I also remembered that in our first two years of marriage, we changed apartments a lot...looking for better deals etc... Way back then we didn't have much to move and it was nothing to do so but now...oh my, way too much stuff.