Move to Phoenix imminent

It looks like we're about to pack up the truck and move back to Phoenix/Mesa in the next few weeks. We'll be staying at my parents' house/compound in northeast Mesa, the house on a hill that overlooks the entire south Valley.

First, I'm trembling because I've become accustomed to much a more moderate summer climate here in Sacramento. It's nearly as dry and about 5 to 10 degrees cooler on average. It cools down a bit at night. Summer lasts from mid-June until mid-September. In Phoenix, the average summer day is about 105, and summer runs from early May until late October.

There's a reason why James White is such a curmudgeon. I suspect that cantankerous attitude will hit Wayne Grudem, a recent Phoenix transplant, any day. Summer in Phoenix is having a negative impact on the Evangelical thinking world. Pray for more vacation days to San Diego for those two and thank the Lord Phillip Johnson lives in Southern California -- we'd be buried up in a white hot blogging fury.

Back to my parents' house.

My parents have dreamed of owning property on this hill since we moved to Phoenix in June of 1975. They bought this property in 2000 and began designing their dream house.

However, before the dream house construction could begin, my father needed to make sure the MOST IMPORTANT THING, in his opinion, was put on the property: His dream garage.

This garage, which I have dubbed Garajmahal, is over 2,200 square feet of Weekend Workshop Warrior shrine. It's extended vertically so someone can fit a truck with a boat trailer attached and still shut one of the three garage doors. It has enough custom cabinet space to hold three disassembled airplanes. It is air conditioned and has satellite TV feeding to the mounted television on the back wall. It comes with a commercial/connected water tub. Lighting is inset.

If this sounds like a little boy's dream fort, that's because my father never stopped building them as a grown man. Every house we've owned he has constructed some kind of otherworldly fortress of solitude. I think if he had his druthers, he will be buried beneath Garajmahal, just in case you can take it with you.

Behind Garajmahal is a 750 square foot mother-in-law setup that Jess and I will be living in. A tiny little one-bedroom apartment behind a garage with lots of loud electric tools, at a middling elevation in the middle of the desert that has more poisonous critters than Times Square may not sound like a piece of heaven to most. However, for the first time since the both of us lived at home with our parents years ago, we will not have a common wall with another living creature. We will have our own washer and dryer again. We will not have Mexican immigrants flooding our parking lot playing Mexican folks ballads at 120 decibels at 2 a.m. Sunday mornings. Twenty feet from our front door is a heated swimming pool and spa. This might as well be nirvana to us.

So pray for us, but say a prayer of thanks to God for us that, in our fiscal ineptitude, we have such a wonderful retreat with which to regroup. Things have not gone as we have imagined. We've only been married for 2.5 years, but we've endured a sundry list of complications I would not wish on anyone. We are coming out stronger for this, fortified in our faith and love for God, more appreciative how, even when things are immensely difficult, God is taking care of us in ways beyond our understanding.

We do not serve a God that always gives us what we want. We serve a God that always gives us what we need, and that is far better or more worthy of praise in my limited perspective.