I want to write a bit about our life in Vancouver. It’s not easy out here. Sure it’s pretty, but we still feel quite isolated, no matter the view. (And we’re actually in Richmond.) But we need to keep reminding ourselves of some of our miracles of getting here when things get hard. Like so many of the Psalms, recounting God’s goodness when life is hard. Or in Exodus, after being pursued by Pharos armies, and Miriam sang, “Sing to the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and rider thrown into the sea.”
· The last time I spoke in Ontario, I told them that we were moving to Vancouver, even though we had yet to find a place to live. We were moving THAT week, with still no home to move to… and we were praying... (and we were also quietly freaking out.) Joanne and I had spent months going over websites and newspapers and Craigslist, writing e-mails, making phone calls. It was our nightly activity. And we were a week away from our departure date and still had no place to live.
· Then we got a phone call from Toni, and he’d seen something in the paper he thought we should check out. It was with BC Housing, so it was supplemented, which was nice because everything that we’d looked at that we could afford, was a dump.
· So we checked it out online, it looked good, made some calls, they e-mailed an application to us, we filled it out and faxed it back. Then they called us to let us know that we got it – and this all happened on the day the truck arrived for our stuff.
· It gets better. But first I want to take a little stroll through real estate land to give you more of the big picture. Joanne read in the paper that the price of an average starter home in Vancouver is $649 thousand, so I took the figure 649,000 dollars, and I decided to see what it would get me in other places I have lived. First, in my home town in NC, that amount would get me this
or this
Or the one below in Cambridge, Ontario, notice the pool.
Or this in Vancouver...
Same amount. This house costs $649,000 dollars.
· Isn't that nuts? We face the same problem in the grocery store. A block of cheese for $12.99
(If you’ve been supporting us, Thank you, please pray about continuing.)
· Which makes it all the more miraculous that we found this place.
There is a playground nearby. And I can get to work in less than 15 minutes. It’s a Godsend. And when we moved in, we were talking to a neighbour, and she was raving about the place and said that she had been on the waiting list for a year before she could get in. I did not have the heart to tell her that we got in in less than 24 hours.
· I later met another neighbor that told me that only 5 of these units are supplemented. (I thought they all were.) And she said that she had been on the waiting list for TWO years! So how was it that my boss saw something in the paper? Weren’t there a bunch of people on a waiting list? And wouldn’t they have been flooded with phone calls?
· Or is this my horse and rider thrown into the sea?
· We know that God wants us here. And I know that this is what He has called and equipped me to do.
