Los Angeles is like a breath of fresh air. You guys, I didn’t want to go for a walk the other day because I saw it was 90° – but when I stepped outside, it felt almost pleasant, because there was no humidity to go with it!
People on the East Coast love to joke about people saying, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat,” but as someone who’s lived in swamps and deserts, let me assure you: a dry heat is significantly cooler and significantly better. The one downside is that air conditioning doesn’t work as well – but that matters so much less when just shade can lower the temperature by like 10-15 degrees!
Don’t get me wrong; dry heat is still heat. 90° is not my preferred temperature regardless of humidity. But I’d take 90° with 10-20% humidity over 80° with 70-80% humidity any day of the week.
The rest of Los Angeles is just as wonderful as I remember. The people are nice, the movie theaters are well-maintained, the food is excellent. Now that I’ve been to Tokyo (which is, unfortunately, almost strictly better (which is crazy)) some of the sheen has come off, but it really is the best place I’ve lived in the United States.
Which is good, because unless God moves in a big way in a short timeframe, we’re gonna have to get jobs and a place to live here. We’re already strategizing a bit, thinking about where we’ll look first, that sort of thing. It’s not a fun conversation, but it’s an important one, so. If it doesn’t work out here I don’t know what plan C is (plan A is, of course, going back to Japan); I’d rather go back to Virginia than Florida, but I’d even more rather go to, like, Korea, so who knows? Our navigation system for the last… long time has been “Make steps almost at random and let God close doors if we’re going the wrong way.”
I won’t say I’m not worried, but the fear is like… it’s kind of like hunger, in the specific way of it comes up often, multiple times a day, but it’s always easily dealt with. I’m frequently anxious, but every time I start to get anxious, I read the Bible, do a quiet time, or pray, and things calm down. I’ve been rereading the Torah recently, Genesis-Deuteronomy, and when I start to get nervous about if God is going to provide for me, it’s really helpful to look at the Israelites post-Exodus and just how stubborn and forgetful they were. They had seen God move in big, undeniable ways, over and over again, but each time they faced a new struggle – or sometimes even just the same struggle over again! – they immediately turned to panic. There are some times I read that story with a sort of lofty arrogance – “Those silly people! If I had seen God part the Red Sea, I wouldn’t worry about if he could X/Y/Z.” But like, dude, I’ve seen God do all sorts of stuff in my life and I worry that he’s gonna stop providing for me all the time.
To be a little fairer to myself, part of that worry is less “God’s gonna stop taking care of me” and more “I got it wrong this time and he’s not gonna make things work out because I’m on the wrong path now.” But even that fear ultimately boils down to one (or both) of two things: either the fear that God won’t provide for me once I shift course towards whatever his plan actually is, or the fear that I’m going to look like an idiot. And both those fears are, ultimately, baseless. For the former, of course he’ll provide a new course for me; for the latter, it’s good for me to feel like an idiot if I’m being an idiot.
Okay, there is also the fear that we’re not just wrong on the short term, that we’ve been wrong all along and we’re never going to get to stay in Japan. Man, that fear is infrequent, but when it hits, it hits hard. But even that one just boils down to the other two fears, or else the fear that what God wants for us is different than what we want for ourselves, but that’s a dumb fear too – God is smarter than me, knows what I like better than I do, and likes me more than I like myself; I think it’s safe to trust his calls for my life.
(I was going to include an full update on our cat Xena here, but realized this post was long enough, so for the moment I’ll just say that she’s doing really well! She still doesn’t love the McFarlands’ cats and dog, but she’s getting along with them better and better as time passes, so we’re not worried at all.)