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4. It’s Texas Time
In the wee hours of Friday night or Saturday morning on Labor Day weekend of 2007 a swat team launched an assault on a home three door’s down from our home. The Henderson Nevada Police Department were looking for the people who had lived there prior to the current tenants and had mistakenly attacked the wrong residence. I was so shell-shocked by the wailing, screaming and interrogations conducted on the front yard replete with three ambulances idling across the street in the dark waiting to transport dead, dying or wounded neighbors that I chose to isolate in the master suite for the next two days and thought to myself; do we still live in America?
My husband realized that it was time to go and that the Lord had a new plan for our lives. We listed our home the following Tuesday and when Chantel our Real Estate agent arrived she counseled us with the words: “buyers are like gold” to induce us to offer our home at a sellable price. My husband asked her what was a suitable offering price and she replied $500K. He immediately responded and said great then make it $450K. She drew up the contract and we sold our home in one day and were paid out of escrow less than three weeks later.
We moved to the outskirts of Las Vegas and rented a luxurious Executive Mansion on a two year lease but a few months later the owner and unmarried woman according to her court filing declared bankruptcy and would not accept our rent. We resided there for another nine months prior to leaving the unstable economy in Southern Nevada for El Paso, Texas where we remain today.
One night while we were chatting and deciding to host a new meeting in our much smaller rental and apartment my fear of financial insecurity emerged from one of the pain pockets in my mind.
I addressed my concerns of scarcity and my husband responded and said. “look we refinanced our first home and received a check for $50K, then we sold it and realized another $219K in gains, then we lived rent free for nine months and now are residents of Texas and the most stable economy in the United States and we couldn’t have done any of it if we didn’t host each of those dinner meetings and give of our time and treasure because people are by nature greedy and selfish.
This is nothing personal just the nature of the beast within us all. It comes with the territory and only through much practice and discipline including practicing self denial could we be prepared to sell our home at below market and then embrace the misfortune of another for FREE rent.
He then said: “What many people fail to grasp about spirituality is that it hosts many practical applications.”
It is now 2014 and we both continue our lives of love and dedication to each other, the Lord and the weak as Jesus commanded in the Acts of the Apostles. [1] Of course we have our problems like other married couples and we have endured the stressors of a declining economy. Our income has dropped precipitously from over 150K a year to about 50K now. But our expenses have declined by over 80% so we are actually saving more money than ever before! I firmly believe that the Lord was using our neighbor to warn us the approaching man made doom to engulf Las Vegas. Our prior home is now worth about what we paid for it in 2001 or 262K which means the family that purchased our home has lost a staggering 200K not including upgrades.
Meanwhile My Mother and Brother have apparently bankrupted a once thriving franchise of 17 Pizza Stores raking in $8M a year and my former husband informed me that he moved My Mother into a trailer. She is now approaching the tender age of 75.
My older Sister eventually left the Pizza Business divorced her second husband and was allegedly moved by her children from her foreclosed home prior to the Sheriff arriving and evicting her. David her second former husband drove a BMW onto her driveway and handed her the keys as a divorce settlement and when the car needed repairs she dropped it off at the shop and accepted their offer of a courtesy car to putt around town but in her dysfunctional thinking as a street person might consider drove the dealership BMW from Northern California to the Mexico Arizona border for the annual family reunion piling on several thousand miles before returning their courtesy car a week later. Nothing was ever too good for Carrie like taking advantage of other people’s generosity.
4. Cowboy Junkies-Trinity Sessions 1988.9
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