It is Monday afternoon. Can it be that only thirty hours ago life turned upside down? My brother, his wife, daughter and her husband had taken refuge in Tennessee, where my sister-in-law, Joyce had grown up, from the hurricane aimed at their home in Florida. But it was in Tennessee that God took Joyce to her heavenly home.

In the hours since we heard the news, our heads and hands have been filled with plans, phone calls and tears as we came to grips with a new way of doing family. Today we spent a large part of the day out in civilization making phone calls and arranging hotels and travel plans to go to Tennessee where Jim will have the funeral.

What I never expected besides Joyce’s sudden home going, we had spent nine weeks with them since January, was how I would feel about our tiny house, perhaps, because of her home going.

Like most women, I enjoy shopping, whether it be at a yard sale, consignment shop, T J Maxx, or Walmart. I think it goes back to that place where women canned and preserved all the food and sewed all the clothes. They provided for their families. Today we search for the best buys, the greatest value we can find for our money. I think that penchant for shopping and search for ways to stretch our money rises out of the same place where we find satisfaction lining up shining jars of jam or tomatoes or peaches on the shelf.

Anyway, there we sat at Mc Donald’s at the Vestal Shopping Plaza where we had been using their wifi to make hotel arrangements, and all I could think about was 

escaping the hubbub of so much noise. Escaping to the Tiny House.  I said as much to Jim, and he replied that was how he was feeling. I never expected this. That the Tiny House would so quickly feel like home. That the longing for our home of twenty-four years would be replaced in our hearts by a tiny place on the shore of a peaceful lake in the Endless Mountains. How it would feel like a place to do more than charge our batteries, to be more than a vacation spot, but be a haven. I didn’t expect that.

We have always recharged our personal batteries in the mountains, soaking up the peace, the quiet where we can hear God’s choir murmuring sweet lines into the air. But after we left those refuges, I was always glad to get back to my “real life.”

Today, we wanted to get back to the Tiny House, the place of little stuff but great beauty, and room and place to listen to the voice of God. We wanted to get back to the silence where we could remember Joyce and hear God’s voice reminding us that He was here all along, just waiting for us to notice Him. Waiting for us to remember that He dwells in our hearts, (Eph.3), and He loves us and wants to comfort us.

I guess, much like my last post, it’s still about perspective. And we are finding it easier to have our right perspective here in the middle of some of God’s best work.