“No problem, Mr. Bob. When and where?”
He explained that this family of 14 had been displaced from Texas due to the poor economy and job loss in addition to needing to vacate the house where they were staying as the home owners needed it back. We sent the boys to move their furniture to a smaller house in Chippewa and the rest to a storage facility. It’s providential how God leads certain people in your life like me and Mr. Bob. It’s also providential that God keeps leading young men with a multitude of personalities and a great degree of setbacks and difficulties to Tiger Pause. Yet, in stormy weather or clear skies, they all have “motors” to keep them going and, if I learned anything while playing football, you can win when you got the horses. So, we helped that day and moved on to the next project.
Fast forward to March of this year. I received a call from the head of that household thanking me, once again, for our help last summer and to let me know that he found a job in San Francisco, CA and would like to donate some of his furniture to the Furniture Bank. I’m not sure why, but something inside made me say, “Well, if you like our work, how about letting us move you to San Francisco?”
“You do that?” he asked.
“Like Larry, Darryl, and Darryl from the Bob Newhart show, we do anything for a buck.”
So after some calculating, we struck a deal and the adventure and grand experiment was afoot.
Now, I could use the next two years of the newsletter to describe all the side trips of our journey, and I would love to tell you about them face-to-face over coffee, but here’s the recap.
On the evening of June 16, four adults and five young men set sail with two dogs, a rental car, our cargo van, and a full-size U-Haul truck. Out of respect, I relinquished my captain’s hat to Mr. Karczewski. Tim Bonomo and Dave Slebodnik were the “first mates” and the boys and I looked and felt like the crew in Ben-Hur—crammed and rowing.
Two quick highlights: After driving for two days straight, unloading a truck in the middle of the night and with only two hours of sleep, we headed out to the Golden Gate Bridge where we witnessed the sunrise over the bay as we crossed. The boys acted like giddy old folk on a bus tour and I didn't know if Mr. K was crying because of sheer joy or if the Red Bull was wearing off. Then, we went to Muir Beach where we saw a shark eating a school of fish and, for some of the boys, it was the first time they had ever seen an ocean.
The trip was filled with devotions and teachable moments of God’s grace, majesty, and creation that the leaders took time to drive home in the minds of the young men which accomplished something totally unimaginable but God led. Saturday morning, June 22, roughly 120 hours after our initial departure, they arrived home safe and forever changed.
Semper Fi,
Matt Nance
