The Flog – The Fabry Log

I felt a little lighter yesterday because after a long search we had finally found a house that passed all the tests we could throw at one. Andrea went to the realty firm and filled out the application and paid the fee. After the radio program we were driving to a doctor's appointment when the realtor called. He's a nice young man who drove a lot of miles to show us a couple of houses. He said the owner had decided not to rent to us.

Andrea wept. We had planned the next 6 months in this new, remote community and thought it would work. The kids began asking questions about "Why?" We didn't have answers. Still don't.

This is another setback in a long line of bad phone calls. It feels like a cruel joke at times, and at others just bad luck. But I don't believe in luck. And I don't believe this type of thing happens in life for no reason. There is a purpose in the seemingly endless dot-to-dot scratching and clawing that is our lives.

It reminds me of our first trip to Chicago in 1983. Andrea and I had been married 6 months and we'd packed everything we owned into the back of a 1978 Toyotoa Corolla Hatchback (whose engine, I am convinced, is still running in some junkyard). I had secured a small apartment, subletting it from a young woman who lived in the city. We were to meet her at Hemingway's Restaurant, which I don't think is up on the North Side any longer, to pick up the keys. We didn't have mattresses. We were going to sleep on the floor.

However, at Hemingway's she handed our deposit to me in cash in a crumpled white envelope and said she had changed her mind. Andrea wept that night, too. We'd never been to Chicago together and had no idea what to do. We spent that first night, a long one, in a hotel on the South Side. The next day we spent looking for an apartment, believing God really wanted us to study at Moody. It seemed right, but everything was going wrong.

The next night we slept on the floor of some strangers who became good friends, Greg and Lisa Hatteberg. Greg was in the admissions department at Moody and had heard of our plight. The next day we heard the news that someone had departed from the married student's dorm and that night we slept in a fully furnished apartment on campus. It was like a death and a burial and a resurrection. Two nights of darkness and then a lot of light.

For us, the rest was history. Andrea and I both took classes, thought we would be in some kind of "missions," but God had other plans.

Fast forward to 2009 and here we are again, living in a hotel, still believing that there is a purpose in all of this wandering, and instead of packing all of our belongings in a car, we're packing our children. I'm looking forward to the sunrise after these long nights.