-Continued from this post–

We did not get the jobs. I could hardly believe it.
As you may remember, the Plan was predicated on getting a leg up – getting a boost of income from hard, steady, probably risky work. But when these two decently incomed jobs were pulled just out of reach, I had to reconsider. Mostly, I was driven to consider the other side of the economic equation. Any really good plan must be flexible – unless, I suppose, the Planner happens to be both omniscient and omnipotent. Being just slightly short of those features, I discarded our first plan and drew up a revision.

If we could not boost what was coming in we would have to lower what was going out.

We would have to lower it so much that our income could be negligible. Once I grasped this situation, I flew into action. Hope dawned anew as I considered how much we wouldn’t be able to spend. This was not only beating The System, this was beating it without its even knowing that it was being beaten. For by all appearances, we would be losing the economic game while in fact, we would be outwitting it. We were exchanging silk for cotton and then finding out that cotton was more comfortable anyway. To evoke yet another striking analogy, by not earning enough money to buy cake, ironically, we would be having our cake and eating it too.

The first steps to our old plan had been “find lucrative jobs.” The first steps to our new plan were “find any jobs.” So James found a job as a grocery store clerk – a perfect place to lay low and hide from The System – while I laid low at home. It was the fox-hunt equivalent of running through a stream.

Once at least one job had been secured, housing in our prospective city became imperative. But like everything else, The System seemed to know of our intentions; real-estate prices had been on the rise for a few years and were at an unreasonable crescendo. A single room in a house was going for what we had paid for an entire apartment in South Carolina two years before. I still hadn’t found a job and to top it off, James wasn’t getting the 40 hours a week he was promised. No amount of optimism could make $200 a week against an average of $1300 rent look plausible. All still seemed against us.

But there was one thing that even The System wasn’t counting on: honest, old-fashioned hospitality. This second thing was so simple and provincial that The System could not have thought of it. It was too big to see, if you understand me. Simply enough, a family from our church let us live with them.

At this point, I should step back and explain that the very reason we had chosen Fort Collins, Colorado (the subtle step 2.5) was to help, if possible, with a church-plant: Gospel Life. Now, bolstered by their support, we could continue our crafty offensive against The System. Even better, we could continue it from a place that was slightly beyond the purview of its watchful eye: Wyoming. The System would never think to look among the buffalos because that’s just not how Systems think.

So finally, after my lengthy ramble, I’ve come to the reason why that 1977 Airstream is reclining by our curb.

Recall that our plan was to lower our expenditures. Recall also that housing was a huge expenditure that would result in a thoroughly hand-to-mouth existence. It was primarily those two frowning realities that caused us to turn back and find an alternative, in short, a camper. If we could get a decent price on an old one and find a cheap place to park it then we might just be able to avoid the renters’ death spiral and put something into savings.

And so, the idea of the USS Whitmore was born.

More to come…