Your Youth Pastors might be Drug Dealers, but Probably not...
We had been married a little over a year and we were thrilled when we got to move closer to the church where we were youth pastors. We moved from a brand spankin new apartment that rented for $305 a month. It was our first home and included a bedroom, bathroom, living room-kitchen combo, washer and dryer hookups (but we couldn’t afford a washer and dryer) and a dishwasher. Ah the dishwasher!
We had such a strong desire to live in the same community of Strafford with our students that we were willing to make a sacrifice. We were young and didn’t realize what that sacrifice would entail. We moved into this little house on a large piece of property. The property belonged to this really rich man and our “cottage” was at the entrance of it. It was his vacation property complete with stocked ponds, waterfalls, and a real-life tee-pee for his grandkids to play in. Now before you think that we lived in an oasis in Strafford, Missouri, let me clarify. We lived in the house that I believe had originally been built for the “help.” We had a 10 foot chain-link fence in front of our house and a dirt driveway beside our house that led to the vacation estate behind us.
The house itself consisted of a kitchen, living room, 2 bedrooms, and a bathroom. You could run laps in the house because their were doors connecting all the rooms together. There were a “few" quirks to our abode. We didn’t have central air and heat. We had a window unit in the kitchen for air conditioning and a gas stove in the living room for heat. The heat never really got to the other places in the house. In fact, in the winter, you could almost freeze to the toilet seat if you weren’t careful. We cleverly decided to add a little portable heater to the bathroom in case of such emergencies. In the summer, we would put blankets up over the doorways in the kitchen because the air conditioning could only really handle cooling the small kitchen. We realized the problem was the single-pane windows and lack of insulation. When walking by one of the windows or sometimes a wall in the house, you could feel wind in the winter time. How cozy!
I remember distinctly waking up one morning on our water bed. Yes I said water bed. It was free. We were poor. It was cold. I mean, it was always cold in the house in the winter, but this morning we may have had the potential for icicles forming inside the house. Luckily our water bed was heated so we weren’t frozen yet. Daran ran to the gas stove while I huddled in the warm water bed praising my brave husband. We realized that we were out of gas! We had filled the tank when we moved in a little over a month before. We were in shock and decided that the house was not meant to be livable warm like our apartment was. Oh our apartment. How I missed it! So we ordered more gas and started wearing multiple layers of clothing in the house to get us through the winter.
Summer came and we realized that it was equally as hot as it was cold, but the students loved our little house. They would come over every night. Our favorite pastime was playing volleyball in the yard. We even played night volleyball. You wonder how, but we were clever back then. We had two of those halogen lamps that got super hot and could start house fires. We took them outside and propped them up so that they would face the volleyball net. The best part was smelling the bugs as they were zapped on the piping hot bulb. It was only mildly distracting.
I was an unusual youth pastor’s wife in that I did not serve hot dogs and pizza often. I loved to cook so I cooked a ton of gourmet food in large quantities. We didn’t have a dishwasher in our little kitchen. Actually we only had about five feet of counter space. Two feet of it was covered by my dish rack I used to hand wash the dishes. I used our linoleum covered table as a pseudo-counter top. Needless to say, I washed more dishes by hand in that house than I ever could have nightmared of.
The other issue is that I couldn’t get the house clean. This may have been the worst one of all. Remember how I told you about my cleaning disorder. I remember getting down on my hands and knees with a razor blade and trying to remove the ancient gook around the baseboards. I think the the linoleum on the floor was once a cream color. At least now, it was a uniform mottled gray brown color. Remember in my last post, I talked about going with my friend Elaine to Ohio to visit her sister. This happened when we lived in this “charmer” of a house. I came back from her sister’s beautiful home depressed at my inability to clean this house. I’m not sure this warranted a state of depression but depressed I was.
Because we had so many cars on the property all the time, the rich owner went to talk to the caretaker of the property. The caretakers were parents of some of our youth. He approached them with great concern. He couldn’t understand why the caretakers had chosen us to live on their property seeing as we were drug dealers and all. Our friends explained to them that we were actually their youth pastors and those were students’ cars at our house. He wasn’t fully convinced and told them to keep an eye on us, but we got to live there through the summer.
Praise God we were able to buy a house before the next winter hit. The new house had a dishwasher, and heat, and air. We got to stop wearing our parkas in the house that winter. Happiness. Although living in that the little old house was traumatic, we lovingly refer to it as “The Shack.” So many beautiful memories were made there and so many lessons I didn’t know I needed to learn were learned there.
Lessons learned from above story:
I love dishwashers: They are like spas for dishes and those that once had to wash said dishes.
I love central air and heat. It’s the next best thing to living in climate-controlled Heaven.
Living without makes you appreciate living with.
Your youth pastors might be drug dealers, but probably not.
Perspective is golden.