Coming back to town
We just got back home from a seven-day camping trip we go on every year. Well, camping trip isn’t really the right term for it.
We were at the Feast of Tabernacles, which is one of the appointed times mentioned in Leviticus 23 in the bible. The Feast of Tabernacles is supposed to be kept at the end of the harvest. Its purpose was to remind the children of Israel of when they dwelt in “booths,” aka tents, for 40 years when Yahweh brought them out of Egypt. Personally, I feel that this feast is supposed to reinforce our reliance on Yahweh and celebrate that our increase come from above.
I get that idea from places in Deuteronomy where there are descriptions of how Yahweh led the people through the great and awesome wilderness for 40 years and that their clothes and their shoes never wore out. It also mentions that Yahweh fed them with food they were unfamiliar with: manna. (Manna literally means “what is it” in Hebrew.) He also took care of their bodily needs in a way they never could’ve imagined, with the quail He provided.
Deuteronomy 8:18 reminds us (and I’m paraphrasing), that we should remember that it is Yahweh — not our own hands — who has given us the power to gain wealth. This reminder keeps us humble and grateful at the same time.
My family loves the Feast of Tabernacles. We have people from congregations all over the U.S. join us at our feast site. So, we get to hang out and have some good fellowship, not to mention great food. But we also get to unplug from devices and really enjoy nature. Fishing and hiking are normal occurrences. This year, I took the kids down into Pettyjohns Cave, which is under Pigeon Mountain in Walker County.
My kids had a blast as we climbed, crawled and slid our way all the way down to the pancake squeeze — which is a passage where two rocks come together, and you have to army crawl through the mud for 20 feet or so to get to the next room. The height of the ceiling there is no more than two feet at its highest.
In the pancake, we saw stalagmites and stalactites that have grown together to form pillars. And it appears that those little 2-foot-tall (or less) pillars are the only thing keeping the ceiling from crashing down. That’s an eerie feeling, but it’s unfounded. The two rocks that make up the pancake squeeze were there well before the stalagmites and stalactites formed into pillars.
We broke camp yesterday, and this morning was my first day back home. I find myself suffering from something we call “post-feast let-down.” You see, we had been having fun for a week and only rejoicing, as the command states. But when I woke for the first time in a while at 4:45 a.m. to go to the gym, my body didn’t want to get out of the bed.
But out of the bed I crawled because we have projects that need attention. One is in the finishing stages for which we need to schedule some things. I need to line up the cleaner, have the dumpster removed and get a once-over done on the yard so our agent can get pictures taken and then get it on market.
We have another project that needed some outside cleanup. We had just painted it and replaced some siding. The work was mostly done, but we needed to get it all cleaned up outside before the rain came in and made the leftover material a mess. We’re also starting a new project.
After I got through at the gym, I made my way out to that one to make our detailed scope-ofwork video so the guys could get rocking and rolling on it. It’s mostly a cosmetic rehab, but we’re having to replace subfloor in both bathrooms as well as in one bedroom. Everything on the inside will be mainly painting, floor covering and tile around the tubs.
I got the video done, scheduled the guys, contacted the other vendors and got back home before the sun came up. I have a lot of catching up to do, but that’s just normal when you are coming back to town. houses and mobile homes
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