The Walls Come Tumbling Down

Matthew 7:26: But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.

When we disregard God's Words, we shouldn't be surprised at bad consequences. Without a well-thought out plan and barely any money, Tim and I flew into LAX. Once there, Tim got ahold of a more recent amusement/entertainment magazine and found out that the big event he'd been banking on opened the following month. Up until that point, we were blindly following this barely-formed plan...this now became the point of no return! We were snapping at each other, trying to brainstorm different things to do or people we knew. I knew one of my aunts lived somewhere around San Diego, so Tim insisted that I call her to see if we could stay with her for awhile. How awkward! I hadn't seen or talked to my aunt in probably a year, and now he wanted me to cold-call her?! He insistently demanded that I call her, so I did....collect....she sounded pleased to hear from me and surprised to hear that I'd just gotten married! Ever so graciously, she agreed that we could come visit her and her husband. We had just enough money to buy bus tickets from LA to San Diego.

On the bus ride down to San Diego, my world crashed all around me. Until the point of us being stuck in LA without a plan, Tim and I had been living in a fantasy, so we both felt really happy and carefree. After the bubble burst, it really burst. Tim seemed so moody and upset as we rode the bus down the freeway...then he said he had to tell me something very important. And it turned out to be something......very important......

He told me his name wasn't really Tim Harrison, the name by which I knew him and the last name I'd just taken through marriage! He said he had been on parole (crazily, in the state of California), and rather than checking in, he'd hit the road and left the state. As he hitch-hiked around and stayed at various places, he had stayed somewhere where a 'Tim Harrison' was, and saw his social security card. 'Tim' memorized the social security number, then took on the name for his own. He'd been living like that for well over a year.

Wow. Here I was, married to someone I had no business being married to, didn't even really know, and he turned out not to even be who he said he was! And, I was in California with next to nothing, a sad and literal 'I'm not in Kansas anymore' situation...heading down to my aunt's house, with no plan. I entered an almost sleep-walking state at that point. I felt very, very empty and very, very lost!