How much is enough?

"Modern apartments" proclaims a classic old building in a nearby town--though I wonder if by today's standards they are "modern." Okay, they do have "modern" satellite dishes! My town has a similar “transformed” hotel, once our town’s grandest, multi-storied and classy. Now the aging building is bare-necessities apartments for low-income seniors or the disabled. For many, that’s “home”—and even “home enough.” 

As I considered this area’s rental housing market, I recalled what I called "home" after leaving the family home where I grew up. I lived in basements, doubtful neighborhoods, and with many different roommates.  Many places had no washer or dryer, so I took weekly trips to the public laundry, where I read books and wrote letters as the machines chugged. It certainly beat having to swish my laundry in the creek and hang things on bushes to dry! (Okay, I never did that.) One blessing of that time was an invitation from a godly senior in my church (I worked with her son at the daily newspaper) to do my weekly two loads at her home Friday nights while we shared combined leftovers for dinner. I insisted on leaving her my "laundry change" to help with expenses. But it was a pittance for the riches she poured into my life as she prayed with me (and for me), shared her own spiritual growing places, and nudged me toward a deeper walk with God.

 A few years later, a major life change landed me more than a thousand miles away in Los Angeles, where I was a "missionary" at a major mission headquarters. With my "support" income of half or less of my former wage as a newspaper reporter, housing became a challenge. I first rented a room in a private home, then house-sat for an older lady, and finally got into a tiny apartment in an old building, where I “worked off” part of my rent with yard work and maintenance.

The apartments had just the bare necessities: no modern amenities like a dishwasher or microwave. One noisy old coin-op washer and dryer served the entire five-unit apartment building. But it was a place where I could practice hospitality and reach out to people in need who lived in the adjacent units.

At that time, Isaiah 54:2 became especially meaningful to me:

Enlarge the place of your tent;

Stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, spare not;

Lengthen your cords,

And strengthen your pegs.

Written to a culture that used tents for housing, this section predicted that when the exiled nation finally returned to its homeland, it would grow and prosper. The “message” I got for my circumstances was to refuse to isolate myself and shrivel up socially because of less-than-"perfect" housing. Instead, I was to accept my “location” as an opportunity to “stretch out” and be a difference-maker among the people who were then part of my life.

Today, when I look back over photos from the nearly two years I lived there, I don’t think much about what the units “lacked,” but of friendships forged. I befriended an immigrant couple (and with my fractured Spanish helped the wife buy a used sewing machine), encouraged an older widowed neighbor with health issues (oh, how her faith blessed me!), and helped another neighbor get emergency mental health treatment. I also took in two women in desperate situations for a few weeks, one of us sleeping on an old couch.

My “tent” wasn’t very big, but it was big enough for God’s purposes. He knew what I needed, and I tried to be a good steward of His gift of housing at that season of my life.

One more thought: "Home" for the last 35 years has been a small "starter" home where every square foot counts. Yet it, or any of the no-frills apartment where I once lived, would still be a palace to the thousands upon thousands facing starvation in Africa's historic famine. Or, for that matter, for most of the world.