From Desert to Prairie By Plane--and a Gamut of Emotions

Last Wednesday Jonathan and I flew from Phoenix, AZ, to Rapid City, South Dakota--a distance of a thousand miles covered in less than two hours.

The sun was setting in Arizona, out beyond the wings of the airplane. 

Somehow we had managed to pack most of our belongings into our Honda Pilot because the house we'd been staying in was needed to house the children's workers at Gospel Center camp meeting next week. 

 

Since Jonathan and I wouldn't have another chance for a walk in Arizona for a long while, I suggested Jonathan and I go somewhere together, so he found a road up to some bluffs that overlooked Phoenix.

I'm learning to take just one day at a time, trying not to hyperventilate over what the future may hold or how I am ever going to manage all the trips back and forth from South Dakota to Arizona. Instead, we enjoyed one last walk together in Arizona for a while, and I managed not to get quite hysterical when, after we had long left the house in Arizona, I wondered if we had gotten a certain item that I need every day.

Somehow it got left behind somewhere in that house--or the car--in Arizona.

And I'm a thousand miles away in South Dakota. I tried to be a good, mature lady who didn't get over-dramatic about not being able to order the item in until a week later--when I need it every day. 

Instead I prayed, and within minutes found something that would work--one of those things that I had saved just in case!  It wasn't very great, but it would work.

 

 But the day after we arrived home was just plain hard. I thought about how much easier life was in Arizona where I only had to go to the clinic and take care of myself (and move several times in three months). 

We had even gotten to attend a baby shower for Daniel and Monica Anthony's family,

attended by several families who came from as far away as four hours!

We'd been thrilled to see Jason and Backy Corbin again, and to worship with them at Gospel Center Sunday morning where Pastor Trint Castle pastors.  

Now back in South Dakota, I couldn't remember where things were in the kitchen, I felt discombobulated, and after going up the hill for a load of water for the cistern and then driving up the field to the dry well and cistern, I couldn't get the flexible pipe to stay in the cistern opening in the top. Danny has always gotten the water for us but he was away hunting. 

Not having the least idea how Danny did it, I had to figure out which pipes to use that were lying every which way, and how to connect everything. I had offered to do this job since I thought it was something I could do while Jonathan did things I could not do at the house.  I figured out how to connect a white pipe to the water tank on the trailer, to which I connected a black flexible pipe to run into the cistern. But it kept flipping out of the cistern every time I turned on the water from the tank to gravity feed.

I had to walk all the way down to the house from way up the hill to get Hannah to come help. I was not having happy thoughts about our decision to drill a well that was dry, or the way the equipment quit working when Jonathan tried to dig the trench from the Rural Water Line nearly a mile away, and how nothing has worked for us so far about getting good water in. We have made nothing but decisions that went awry. 

How smart we are!

Not knowing how the Lord was going to provide lots of good meat even if we were having water troubles, I was just worrying about all the things going kind of wrong. And when the pipe came gushing out again for the third time, I was about to fall apart, too. It was deep and steep to climb into the gulley to get the fallen pipe in the wet mud. But Hannah used her head and figured out that if we twisted the flexible pipe a different direction, it would not come flying back out of the cistern. 

Presto! I could now turn the spigot on from the 200-gallon water tank on the trailer and let the water into our cistern safely. 

When I went for the second water tank, after talking to our kind neighbor who always lets us get water, we discovered that the water that had filled the tank was brown! This neighbor is at the very end of the line that feeds water to White River from the water tank overlooking White River, and sometimes the water is just dirty. And that is the water I got.

I was not too thrilled.

 

 But when days are like that, I have to remember to try to just get through them. Most often the next day will be better--and it was. 

 

Most of all, I need to remember to take my eyes off the present trials, and to look up.  Not to blame myself or others for decisions that didn't work, but to trust that God will work even this, whatever it is, for good.