Life after classes

My last class was only about a week ago, but it feels like it's been way longer!  This week has been fairly eventful, all things considered.

Monday evening I went to my friend Shelley's house to help her clean.  Their house is on the market so it needs to look good for showings, and Shelley has been splitting her time between Findlay for work and Akron to visit her dad who's in a coma, which leaves little time for household chores.  It was fun to help her out, and it was great to connect with her again too.

Tuesday evening my friend Luke arrived in town after spending the last two months in California attending a missions program.  He gave up his apartment before heading out to CA and needed a place to stay to be back in this area for a little while to wrap things up at his previous job, so Bill and I offered him our guest room.  So far he's been a good house guest, no complaints here yet! :-)

Last night I was supposed to have Bible study with my friend Julie, but it turned out to be a much crazier evening!  She was helping a friend out of town all day and got back later than 6:00 when our study was supposed to start, so I figured we'd just postpone until another evening.  A little after 6:30 she calls me with the news that she has to get out of her apartment - tonight!  She has known this was coming since June but hadn't done a whole lot about it.  There's a lengthy back story behind all this of course, but I'll spare you those details; the end result is she had to get all her stuff out last night and had nowhere to go.  A bunch of us from church had been offering to help her move her stuff out for the last few weeks, but she'd never taken us up on that.  Last night we managed to round up about half a dozen people and a few vehicles, and we just packed up all her stuff however we could and took it to a few people's garages who had storage space we could use, at least temporarily.  How everything came together was a great witness of what true community should be - everyone pitching in and helping when there is a need, and caring for the person in need as best as we can in the process.

We got Julie to the City Mission before 10pm, since they just had one women's bed open up yesterday - definitely a God thing!  We all finished up moving her stuff around 10:30 last night, and then went home and crashed.  It was a busy and crazy evening, both physically and emotionally.  Unfortunately, my brain was still running on overdrive and wouldn't shut down until after 2am, so I'm pretty tired today!  It'll hit me harder tomorrow though, the second day after a short night always seems to be worse.  Fortunately it's almost the weekend, though we're having our annual "Big Shindig" on Saturday so I won't be able to sleep in too late.

Tonight we don't have much going on, mainly just a grocery shopping trip to get supplies for the party Saturday.  With any luck I'll even be able to get some sleep at a reasonable hour.