The Law of Distraction

Most of you who are reading this are aware that our family had a really hard 18 months from about November '06 to March '08. Hard might be an understatement, but I guess that all depends on your perspective. Granted, we are still in recovery mode from that time period and it's not like we are swimming in a pool of money (yet), but even though we are still in the process of getting back on our feet, it's doable compared to the trials we were 'blessed' with during those 18 months. We have experienced so many tender mercies from The Lord, though, and are still experiencing them. Prior to November '06, I would notice these 'tender mercies', but as life would move forward and distractions creped in, they would be quickly forgotten. I am determined to remember them from now on.

I wrote many of them down on a pad of paper I am still searching for. I am praying it didn't get lost in the move, but I will share our latest one because it was Dick Clark's Rockin' New Years Eve.

We had a gas dryer in our Cedar City house. Scott informed me a few weeks before moving that our new house only had electric hookups for a dryer, and no amount of configuring was going to change it so that we could use our gas dryer. So I began posting on craiglist that we wanted to sell or trade our gas dryer, and we'd use the money to find an electric dryer on craigslist if we didn't trade - btw, try Craigslist for everything, it's awesome.

So I'm posting, and posting, and posting....there were a few leads, but nothing ever came to fruition, so we moved with the gas dryer in hopes of selling or trading after we moved.
Well, wash doesn't wait for a dryer, and the dirty laundry was piling up and the girls were starting to look like white trash. There was no dryer in sight, so I bit the bullet and just hung dried indoors, since we had no money to even buy supplies to hang outdoors. So, there were clothes strewn all over the place, and of course they dried stiff. It got old fast, but we just didn't have another choice if we wanted clean clothes, albeit "crunchy", as the girls called it. Scott was going insane, though. He was just using up every last bit of clean clothes he had and "threatened" to start going to a laundry mat. Not a laundry mat! Oh, the humanity of it all!

I didn't mind too much, I was learning some things. Like, no wonder before washers and dryers people didn't have too many clothes, washing all of them would have consumed every stinkin waking moment. And I learned how to efficiently arrange things so they dried the fastest. I also learned that I really really like having a dryer. But after 2.5 weeks of this, Scott reached his limit. He had just gotten paid and told me that he was going to go buy a dryer without looking at the budget. Well, things are still tight, and I knew this unplanned expense might just be a horrible decision. So, Scott called me from Home Depot and tells me of this dryer he wants to get, he talked the guy down and he's not going to offer him this price again, and what do I think, he really can't live in these third world conditions anymore (okay, maybe he didn't say that, but that's how it was coming across). I told him I hasn't finished crunching numbers on the budget yet and I wasn't going to agree to anything until we figured that out.

Scott comes home, oh how do we say....a little testy. When he finally pulled himself together, we crunched numbers and if we didn't pay this or that, moved money around and only spent $100 on food the next 4 weeks (which we had done multiple times in the past while, so I knew how to pull that off), we could get this dryer. As Scott was walking out the door to get the dryer, he gets a phone call. That morning I had posted my 'For Sale or Trade' ad as a last ditch effort to get rid of our gas dryer. It was someone responding to the ad, and they wanted to trade, which was my first choice if we could get a comparable dryer...it just reduced expense, time and headache.

Long story short (too late, right?), we agreed to the trade and Scott set up a meeting place for the next day. It's Saturday, I help him load the dryer, and he's off to trade. He comes back an hour later with a dryer that is in great running condition, it just wasn't as high end as our old dryer and it had a spot where there was a chemical spill or something that had eaten the paint off the dryer. "Okay" I thought, "so maybe we got the short end of the stick, but it was a free dryer, we needed it yesterday, and it works well, so just be grateful." Then Scott says to me, "The guy felt bad that it wasn't an even trade, so he offered me $75." Imagine that....a free dryer and $75. "That was pretty generous considering we agreed to take his dryer as is, kinda defeats the purpose of trading for him, but that's cool of him." Then Scott goes on to explain how this guy wasn't hurting for money - had a great car, was some sort of self made millionaire, etc. I go on to question Scott, then why in the world was he trading dryers instead of just buying a nice one. It was a mystery to Scott, too. I suppose that's how some people make their money is by knowing when to buy and knowing when to trade. Whatever the case, I don't care.
I am just grateful for:
1. A free dryer that works well
2. Our gas dryer going to a good home
3. $75 on top of that
4. Having it all happen the day we needed it to
5. Saving the $280 we were going to use for the dryer and now we can buy more food


Since November '06, The Lord has blessed us with his mercies in the 11th hour multiple times. This was no different. I'm coming to expect it. It's all about faith and trust and being okay with whatever outcome the Lord wants to give us.
Next time I'll blog about our other 11th hour tender mercies in the form of meals from the RS.