Ebenezer Stones

Sunday morning, I woke up with an accentuated sense of insecurity.  “What am I doing?”  “How can all of this work out?”  “Shouldn’t I be through dealing with acne by now?”  These are the kind of intense spiritual battles that I am burdened with. 

 I think that this may have been spurred on, as dumb as it seems, by watching the movie You, Me, and Dupree the other night with some of the older youth group guys.  If you haven’t seen it, basically Owen Wilson is Dupree, a deadbeat who takes advantage of the ridiculous generosity of his newlywed best friend and moves in with them just after the honeymoon.  Hilarity ensues.  Anyhow, about half way into the movie, Stefan and Simon start speaking so fast in German that you’d have thought that they were auctioning off a scnhitzel.  Suddenly, they burst out in laughter, point at my bags littered around Matt and Heather’s living room where I have been staying, and shouted, “You are Dupree!!!”  Okay, I have to admit…this was pretty hilarious. 

Anyhoo, let me relate this back to Sunday morning when I was dealing with acne.  In the weird state of fragility that I am in now, it doesn’t take much for something inane like this to grow into a full-fledged crisis.  “Matt and Heather need me out…Matt is starting work on Monday, Heather is pregnant…the last thing they need right now is me sitting in their living room with a stony glare on my face for two hours as I try to figure out how to upload photos onto my blog.”  So, I thought of introducing the topic of my moving out, but then remembered that my immediate housing option is one of the rooms above the youth cafe in the middle of town, where I would have no shower and no privacy.  “Okay,” I thought to myself, “I will give this another day before I bring anything up.”  And then in my extreme faith I reverted to prayer saying,

“Lord, um…excuse me…yeah, me…uhhh, this is really hard for me to ask…buuuutttt, uhh, if you wouldn’t mind, maybe you could think about possibly arranging some kind of housing for me at church today.  But if not, then I would totally understand, because after all…yeah, if I really put all of my eggs into this one basket, I’d be afraid if you didn’t come through for me.  So really, whatever you want to do…Okay?  Cool.” 

I’m not sure that mustard seeds come in sizes, but I think that this is evidence of a rather small one. 

 So an hour of German praying, singing (?), and preaching later, the church service had ended, and I was approached by a woman who asked, “Are you the American?”  In full knowledge that an affirmative answer could put me at risk of another hour of questioning about Bush and the war in Iraq, I said in my best German, “Ya.”  She then proceeds to tell me in her most beautiful German accent, “Nice to meet you.  You still need a room?  You come live with me.  My boys have an apartment, and have room for one more.” 

At this point, my heart feels like jumping out of my skin, and I want to kiss this woman on the cheeks, but I don’t want to scare her away.  I think that I told her Danke Shon about 20 times. 

So…the story continues.  I will have a place to live and shower for the next month or two, which is an incredible blessing!  Especially the shower. 

So, as I now wait to hear from some of the Language Schools in Nurnberg about job opportunities, I still feel impatient and of little faith.  However, I am encouraged that the Lord has provided for me yet again. 

I have been reading in Joshua, and I think that it is good to build confidence in the Lord through continually marking and remembering these times of his goodness and faithfulness.  So, although this is but a small detail, I will raise an Ebenezer stone in thankfulness for the Lord’s provision.