I’ve got a new app on my phone that Cyndy and I love. It’s called “Autio” and we live it because it tells us stories about the towns or cities you are driving through!
This week Cyndy and I are in Richland, Washington. Most of you know that Richland was kind of created by the government during WWII as the housing spot for all the government workers working on the Manhattan Nuclear Project. But what you may not know is that the early houses built by the government were each named after a letter of the alphabet. There we about 10-15 floor plans and each plan was designated by a letter in the alphabet! Some of these houses still exist today and can be found on any street named after a famous engineer! (Perhaps the most famous of which is Washingtin Street, named after George Washington, our first president and a prominent engineer in his day!)
One interesting fact about Richland is that from the beginning of the Hanover Nuclear project until about 1955, every house and piece of furniture in the city was owned by the government!
This fact reminded me of the first parsonage Cyndy and I lived in. I was a student at Perkins School of Theology on the campus of the SMU campus in Dallas, TX, but I served a two point charge in East Texas, and the parsonage came “fully furnished”!
At first we thought that this was a wonderful idea. I mean you just move in your cloths and your there, right? No lugging a piano up and down stairs. No taking beds apart and trying to figure how to get them into a moving van. I mean it makes a ton of sense. (Side note here: one of my most memorable moves as a kid was the year we moved from White Lake, SD to Wagner, SD. And in order to save money the churches decided to move us using a hog truck! My what a sight we were pulling up to the parsonage in Wagner. We must have looked like the Clampett family in The Beverly Hillsbilly’s)
Anyway, the problem with this fully firnished parsonage came a week later when the “parsonage committee” arrived to inspect the parsonage. As they walked around the parsonage one woman was very upset. When I asked her what was wrong, she shared that one of “her” pictures was missing. Cyndy had taken one picture down and replaced it with a family portrait! Oh my! And, not only that, but we had replaced a bedspread with one my mother had quilted. As a new parsonage family we ended up taking the picture down and replacing the bedspread with the church issued set. But to be honest, we never ever felt like that place was our home!
We always felt like we were a rental family!
And so Cyndy and I are so thankful to Bear Creek for allowing us to move into our own home! We especially enjoyour bedspread…a quilt quilted by Cyndy’s sister, Nanci, who passed away 2 years ago! It is a treasure! Thanks Bear Creek!!! You rock!
Your pastor, thankful to have found a true home here in Washington, Brook
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