My Blog For You

Living in Kelso now was new to say the least.  Trying to find my way around the city was always an adventure or experiment.  It was not like in California where someone would tell you to go down this street three blocks and then turn right, go two blocks, and then left to this address, it was more like take this road to where the blue house is and turn right but veer to the left and take the first fork on the right, look for the lady on the right who will have her laundry hanging out to dry in the sun on the front lawn, turn left there and look for the house on the right that is blue with white trim.  Do this in the evening when the sun is down.  All of Washington I realized is laid out similarly.  It was nothing like Southern California.  Of course, I was born and raised in Southern California so you can hopefully sympathize with me.  Moving forward.  Tamm would introduce me to new things all the time.  Places to eat, things to see, areas to go, seasons and times.  It seemed like everything about our new life was new, exciting, an adventure, at least from my perspective.  I was meeting new people all the time.  I started to think that Tammy knew everyone in this area of Southern Washington and especially Castle Rock, Kelso, and Longview.  After all, she had grown up in this area and had lived here her whole life.  The church we first went to, where we got married in, we continued to attend.  It was a typical AOG (Assemblies of God) denominational church.  Tammy knew everyone, I knew no one.  Services always opened with worship, which typically led to either a prophetic message with lots of fervor or a message in tongues followed by something in English as a way of interpretation.  With that said, worship would rise again and then down to the expository preaching by the pastor.  Occasionally there would be a missionary or some other emphasis.  Not often enough for me.  From these Sunday morning services, on a regular basis, week after week, month after month it became very evident to me that this was it.  I had honestly tried to reach out and meet new people, we even went to what they called “home groups” but even there it felt very much about the order of service and not about hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit and leaning more into Him and less about what kind of food was being served after the meeting.  Not for me… This was all there was going to be presented and more importantly experienced with God.  I remember explaining to Tamm my frustration with the “boxyness” of the whole experience week after week.  It was, to me a giant pep rally to hype me into kind of a hyper-spiritual place.  I had toured and played in bands in places like this almost all of my twenties and into my thirties.  The bands I would play in would show up to do a “special music” number, not to minister.  We had to wade thru all of what I am calling hyper-spiritual cheerleading.  This church had much of the same kind of feel to it.  It may have been all they knew.  It may have been all they had been groomed for or with.  I was looking for more.  I was seeking truer experience with the Father.  I wanted to know that Jesus was in the room, that he was hearing my heart, my wanting more.  I had only in my spiritual journey found that in the Vineyard.  From the beginning, hype and structure was just not part of the experience.  Have you ever heard the expression “Ice skating on the ice with roller skates” The visual picture should give you all you need to know?  It was stripped down, no hype, no cheerleading.  Most of the time it was the Lords still small voice in a quiet moment after a worship song where we would hear someone’s heart, someone is crying out to God for help, for healing, for restoration, for peace, for hope, for love, for more faith.  That heart always melted mine.  That is what I wanted to get back to.  A place where others of like-mindedness had gathered, wanting to hear His voice not our own, not hearing their own voices rise and fall, lifting hype with loud voices or fervor.  We wanted to hear Jesus.  We eventually decided together not so much Tamm as me, that we needed to find a different place.  So, we did, we went into the pastor’s office, sat down with him and I explained “my” frustration.  I am not sure Tammy felt the same frustration; however, she was willing to let me lead.  We shook hands after explaining our immanent departure trying another similar type of church.  In this experience we got involved in several areas of the ministry.  We did some work with puppets, children’s ministry, worship, and teaching.  We were there much longer than the previous church but much of the same frustration and issues at some point came to light.  We had other areas of the body life of the church that in some ways were not in any way a fit.  This time we tried to push thru as Tammy, and I discussed in another way other than being a married couple.  We talked as friends, as equal receiver’s equal contributors.  I wanted her to feel like she had a voice and a stake in the decisions, but I wanted her to hear my heart as I wanted to hear hers in the matter as well.  We both agreed that we would not pull the plug on this endeavor and this Body of Christ until we both agreed.  Again, we met with the pastor, this time by phone because of circumstances and difficulty getting our schedules together.  But with this said we shared our heart and the things that we had issue with and that we had basically agreed to disagree with the direction and leadership model that was being implemented.  Please don’t get me wrong here, we still cared about all these people, and we still see these people, bump into them at Walmart, Starbucks, or places in the area that if I told yout likely you would not know what store that was…It is a small area unlike Southern California where millions of people live.  I am not telling you this to bang my own drum like I know it all, because I don’t.  I really have become sensitive to things like insensitivity, falsity, and liturgy.  When we do the same thing repeatedly it starts to become what is expected or what might be called the norm…We didn’t want any part of that.  I realize a church, or a Body of Believers needs some structure but only structure that is fixed on Him and His will.  Not on “well that is just the way we do it around here” mentality.  Frankly as best as can be done I just wanted each time I met with those God fearing, God believing Jesus’ people to feel the presence of His Holy Spirit and know that what we speak, what we hear, what our worship by the congregation is, is genuine toward the trinity, The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit, three in one…  Moving on, as I do not want to go off on a “bunny trail” or down the “Rabbit hole” any further or deeper. The best part about this struggle I have just written about to you is that Tamm and I did it together.  We did not fight about it, take sides about it, go to our corners over it.  We did it at the end of the day…together.  The first year of our life we lived in a home, Tammy had purchased in Kelso, long before we met.  The back story of it was that this house and the payments for her, was a bit too large to take on.  It had gone thru the paces of foreclosure that happen when you do not pay the mortgage each month.  We did hear from the bank and got the notice to vacate and we soon after getting the notice from the lender moved out.  We found a nice manufactured double wide home in Castle Rock.  We met with the owners, agreed to terms, and moved in.  A good deal for us and much more affordable, but alas a rental home.  We started on Friday nights towatch and played the videos from the ministry of Dave Ramsey and Ramsey Solutions.  The videos were all about learning how to manage and handle our money.  How to put a name on every dollar earned and tell it where you wanted it to go, learning how to budget, how to give and how to get out of debt.  Every Friday we would sit down and for the better part of two hours be schooled in this very important way.  Through this, we learned how to practice these principles.  We listed out our combined debt and from the highest to the smallest started attacking the debt to be free from it.  We had to cut out a lot of things we were as a couple use to doing not only together but as individuals.  There is really no reason to go deeper here as I am sure you can all play out in your own minds what those kinds of things were. Nuff said… 

We started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  We were making a dent in our financial failures, paying off debts and getting ourselves in a financially satisfactory position when our landlord Butch came by one evening to let us know that we needed to find another place to live.  We had been at this home a few years.  The change for our landlord Butch and Cheryl was nothing that we had done.  He was very glad to have us as tenants, we always paid our rent on time.  We took care of the property and helped whenever needed.  It was a very good arrangement for both of us.  One of his daughters or sons I think, were trying to look to move into the area and Butch explained to us, that he had offered to them as a possible option, the house we were living in.  Like I said, it was nothing that we had done wrong, he was just trying to help his family.  He gave us I think two to three months to work this out.  It really forced us to look within the area, not to rent but to own.  This was also another statute that Dave Ramsey had laid out.  Renting something is not as good as owning something.  We soon could not find anything to rent so we decided to look to own.  We got a realtor on the prowl to find us something to look at and put an offer on.  At that time, we had no down payment, but I investigated borrowing on my 401K from work and that seemed to be a way to get say 20K ready.  We had looked and bid and looked and bid on a few homes and every time we put a bid in someone else would bid on the home at a higher price.  We were getting out bid and it was now getting close to the end of the time Butch had given us at the Castle Rock home.  We needed to continue to pack out stuff and get ready, but we had nowhere to take it too yet.  Time was running out.  We went a bit out of the area we had been living in, up to a smal poke and plum town called Toledo.  Not the one in Ohio but still in Washington.  A poke and plum town is this…You “poke in” and your soon “plum out of town”.  I called it a “Mayberry” kind of town.  You know like the kind of town that was in the sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” or “Mayberry RFD”.  These were funny TV shows about a little town where everyone knew your name, your business and even the details you wanted very few people to know…There was thegas filling station/grocery store/rental stop…the general store, the one bridge in the town, the one stoplight you know that kind of town.  I had in many small towns in Washington unlike the big cities of Southern California where, the only way you knew you were in a different city was by the small city limits signs they put up at each end of town.  If you drove, you just had city after city after city all squished together.  That is what they call a metropolis.  I had in Washington lived in Monroe, I had lived in Sultan, I had lived in Gold Bar when Cheryl was alive.  Once I moved out of that area and down south to the Southern part of Washington I had lived in a few other towns like Kelso, I had lived in Longview, I had lived in Castle Rock the longest with Tamm but now we were having to move again.  This was an even smaller small town, Toledo.  I remember when the realtor took us to this house in Toledo the first time.  We walked in and everywhere on every wall in the front living room, dining room and kitchen, the Great Room floor plan I had seen a lot in California and was starting to come to the Northwest.  Everywhere you looked was a trophy deer, elk, moose, big horn sheep, bird fowl trophies scattered in between.  The house had been on the market for a long time.  We knew that fact walking in.   I said out loud to Tammy once we had walked thru the front door, “No one can visualize all of these trophies being removed and gone and just clean, blank, plain, walls there”.  Together we walked into the master bedroom, bathroom and the two other bedrooms of the house.  They all had a kind of “outdoor” feel to them.  We walked into and thru the utility room to the garage and finally saw that the people that presently owned the house were outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen and most of all were hunters.  They had two four-wheelers all camouflage painted ready to go out with all the gear you could ever want for all “expeditions.”  We looked the first time and left feeling like so many others who had been thru to view the house probably felt.  “Not for me”.   We had been “skunked” so many times before from the other houses we bid on that we went back to this house on Pine Street to look again, a few days later.  The outside was all fenced with an apple tree, lemon tree, fig tree and a big walnut tree in the yard.  It was a nice piece of property with the house on the lot to the east side of the property and open grassland to the west side.  We would have to get a ride-a-long mower to cut the grass but that was obtainable.  We knew the price on the house might have been another reason why it did not sell.  We had nothing to lose.  After talking it over Tamm and I went down to the realtor’s office and decided to make a bid on this house.  We decided to really low-ball our offer though.  We had confidence that if the owner wanted to really sell, he would come back with a realistic figure in reply.  They did.  We came up a bit. They made another offer.  We came up a bit more, finally meeting and agreeing with conditions.  We had all those conditions met and we soon put our 20K down and became the owners of a very comfortable home.  We were very excited, moving in in mid-2017.  Moving was the next task.  Our pastor at that time had helped many people with this unwanted task.  All we had to do was make sure everything was in a box, rent the truck and he would put together a large group of folks who evacuated all our belongings, boxes, furniture, all items in storage, everything. 

All I needed to do was point.  Furniture, tables, lamps, work related items, pictures we just had to point.  Before this “moving day” had come, we had color coated every box with labels to let them know when we got to the new address how to and where to put them in.  All Tammy and I had to do was point.  Honestly, the large crew from the church had removed everything from the Castle Rock home, had loaded it in the truck and arrived at the new Toledo home, together we were in and out of the rental truck, everything out of the truck and in its place in under 2 hours.  A world record time.  It was not even lunch time yet.  We got some pizzas and pop and had a great lunch together.  Once everyone had left, we listened to the silence and smiled.  We were in and still had some energy to spare.  Good times, well remembered…Now all we had to do was unpack and get settled in… 

More Next Week