How God Takes Care of Us

So....these last couple of weeks, we are constantly reminded of how God is there taking care of us, when we ask and even when we don't.

For instance, two days ago I was out for a meeting and was returning home. I had just talked with Angie and told her I could stop by our favorite pizza by the slice place and pick up some pizza for lunch, when she asked if I had been able to pick up some dishwasher calcium cleaner. I hadn't and she said not to worry about it that she would get it later in the day. I decided to go ahead and go by the store to pick it up to help her out. As I was walking I thought of the two air conditioner holes in our windows and how I needed to call the glass guy (in Italy you have a glass guy) to replace the panes before we moved. I thought of how difficult it can be to get ahold of this guy and kind of started to worry (my bad). You see we don't have much time left. So, I got to the street where our grocery store is (in Italy you have a grocery store - it's one block from our house) and I walked right by a guy carrying a pane of glass. Funny, I didn't think a thing of it...yet. I looked in at the grocery store at the line was extremely long...I thought about it and didn't think that Angie would want me to wait in the line that long just for the cleaner, so I turned around and headed home. Then I passed the guy carrying another pane of glass. I walked right by him and then stopped dead in my tracks. At first I just thought he was putting up some glass shelving in the store he was going in, but the panes were big....was he a glass guy? Could this be God's way of setting something up with some other glass guy so that we could get things moving in the glass department? I turned around and he was bringing another pane of glass up and I asked him, "do you work for this store or do you work with glass?" He said, "he was a glass guy." I said, "Good because I have two windows with holes that I need to get replaced before we leave." He said, "You'll have to ask the boss," then pointed behind me. When I turned around, there standing before me was our glass guy! I explained what we needed and that we were moving and he said he would come over right after that and measure them. He came and the next day they came and installed the new panes of glass. It was only 60 euro!

Then today, I planned on solving our moving problem. You see living in an apartment has some problems when you have large furniture. In Italy, they have these elevated platforms that you can rent that come up to your balcony and you put your stuff on it. You can also put smaller stuff on it and it saves you from using the elevator or going down the five flights of stairs (we're on the fifth floor). So, Angie helped me find some numbers and I started calling. We had a friend who had told us he knew someone who did moving and he would try to get some information for us. He didn't come through. So that's how we found ourselves four days before our moving date looking through the yellow pages. After calling a few places, it looked bleak. Many couldn't do it that soon because they were booked. And the prices for renting the elevated platform, moving van and having them help move was looking to be too expensive. The average move has a cost of 2,000 euro or more. Just the platform has a cost of 450 euro for a five hours. Remember we take even our kitchen with us, that means it needs to be taken down and then moved to storage as well as the rest of our furnishings. So, I finally called one guy by the name of Pino and he said the elevated platform was available for Tuesday, but we still needed a rental van. He graciously said he could be over in thirty minutes to give us a precise estimate for everything. He came and fifteen minutes later we had hired three movers, the moving van and the elevated platform. The Ancona team is going to be helping us that day too and he took that into account for how many other men he needed to bring. It is going to cost 600 euro for everything. God is awesome and he always takes good care of us.

Prayer of Thankfulness

This morning I decided to tackle packing the books in the living room. I turned on my favorite DVD of the Gilmore Girls and happily set to work. I hadn’t been working long when I noticed that I could hear a group of kids outside. I went to the window to see and there below in our piazza were kids on a field trip. One of the schools near our house has a teacher who on occasion brings his students to our piazza for class. It is a nice piazza with lots of trees and a small area with stadium like seating where the kids can sit and the teacher stands below so all the kids can see him. I have seen him down there many times and he seems like a fun teacher making the kids laugh and often including songs in his teaching.
I stood outside and watched them for awhile. I noticed two other people in our piazza a elderly man named Gino who is an older man who has lived in this piazza since he was a child. He has some form of dementia. Every day he walks around meeting new friends, of course these are the same people he meets everyday, and he is always willing give you a warm smile and to tell you a war story or two. Then there was Stefania who is a woman who wanders around the downtown area of Ancona. Some days she is as lucid as you and I and you can actually have a real conversation with her. Other days she walks the streets singing at the top of her lungs or on the really bad days screaming as if she is reliving a haunting memory over and over again. Every morning she walks from somewhere up back behind our building around and across the piazza off to wherever she is going that day. Then again in the evening she takes the same path but in reverse back to wherever it is that she calls home.
I know that in a few hours when school is out for the day our piazza will once again be filled with the voices of children playing. Every afternoon from about 5 until the sun goes down our piazza is filled with life. Children playing on the swings, sliding down the slide, playing hide and go seek, boys playing soccer and girls making up dances. The parents and grandparents sit around and talk about their children.
These are the people that we hear, see and talk to each day. They describe the daily life in our piazza and as I stood this morning and watched I felt comforted. All was right and normal today but then I remembered…not all is normal because I am packing my house into cardboard boxes. These people and sounds that have over the years become home to me are soon to be a memory. This will only be my home for a few more weeks. I don’t know what I will see when I look out my window in Verona but I pray that the people and sounds will again become comfortable to us. I will miss our piazza and I am so thankful that God has given us the years we have had here. So with a prayer of thankfulness in my heart I return to my boxes wondering what sounds I will hear coming in my windows when it is time to unpack these boxes.

And the Packing Begins

Fortunately for us, there is a Mailbox etc, right around the corner from our house. Angie and I went and picked up some boxes and bubblewrap so that the packing could commence. Rather than doing it all in one week, we are focusing on one room at a time and getting small sections packed away. The boxes in the dining room bring sadness due to the reality of leaving, and excitement in anticipation of a new adventure.