Living in a Tent (part 1 of Redemption)

A fellow blogger encouraged me to write about life before and up to Christ. So here goes:

Our redemption began (unbeknownst to us)  by watching a documentary in May of 2013 called Zeitgeist, a documentary completely against Jesus or any kind of religion. Isn’t that peculiar? We completely believed what it was spinning. This documentary was supposed to pull us further away from Christ, and deeper into our non-belief. And it did, momentarily. Well, for a few months (7) anyway.

At this time, my boyfriend (now husband) and I were living together in a rented house full of all the glorious things any human could want to satisfy an always gnawing boredom. We had the freedom to choose, do, and be whatever and whomever we wanted.  Always playing video games, watching movies, watching sports, being on social media. We both had jobs and were able to acquire anything that we wanted. Which was everything, of course. We went shopping a lot.

Something entered into us though the couple of months after watching Zeitgeist that made us want to do away completely with any kind of consumerism. We literally began to feel we were being dominated by our belongings. To feel like nothing we were doing was making any difference to ourselves, let alone anyone else.

Consumerism at its weakest is when the consumer realizes they are being consumed. So we did something extreme.

We decided to have a huge yard sale. Everything that we acquired was now up for grabs, and what we didn’t sell we gave away or pawned away for items that would help us on our new found idea that we wanted to start a life from scratch. We wanted to start from practically nothing and build a life from there, without Jesus still. There was no Jesus was in our lives (to our knowledge anyway).

My parents thought we were crazy, and we probably were/are. In August of 2013 we inherited 3 acres of land from my loving and stupefied parents. They have always been so supportive of me and whatever ideas I have had. They didn’t necessarily like the idea, but I was 25 years old and determined. I believe in their mind it would just be a phase, and I would be back to living like ‘normal’ people in no time at all.

See those water jugs? We carried those about 1/4 of a mile each week down a 70 foot hill, then back up a 30 foot hill. Our driveway was nonexistent at this time. We parked our vehicle at my parent’s house and walked to our tent everyday. Everything was carried here.

So – my boyfriend and I setup a 17 x 10 foot tent. Being the smart people we are (not) we decided to start this new living plan in the DOG DAYS of summer in the deep south of the United States. We bought a solar powered generator to use our USB plug-in Dollar Store fan. That was literally the only air circulation in our tent. The sun set every single evening for 4 hours on the backside of our tent, practically making it an oven. Boy, what fun that was. Also, we stored food inside of a cooler. We had to buy ice every two days to keep anything cold. We cooked out on a fire. I washed laundry by hand and hung it to dry.

Did I mention we shared this space with our two lovely dogs? Well, we did. They are still with us today sharing out 16 x 24 home. We had an outdoor shower, and an ‘outhouse’ that we constructed. We got severe poison oak. My poor future husband wrapped his naked torso around a tree to climb up it to secure the tarp that you see over the tent. The tree was covered in poison oak, then so was he. We weathered many severe thunderstorms in this tent. We lived in this condition for 2 months before deciding we had better start building a more solid structure before winter set in.

 

During this time, my boyfriend and I got to know each other in a whole new way. We had just started dating in September of 2012. Now we were living together in a tent less than a year later, and facing the trials of expedited weather conditions, no solid home, no belief in anything Good, but somehow managing to not kill each other and to stay together. My future husband learned of my severe anxiety (at the time I was on medications for it). I learned about his addiction to pornography which almost killed me, and our relationship. That was quite the battle, but hallelujah, Jesus knows just how to work (more on that in future posts)! We were also battling my parents who did not want us doing this anymore, who saw our relationship deteriorating due to said addiction. They saw a boy who did not want to work anymore, and a daughter who had ‘lost her sunshine’.  They were riding the roller coaster with us.

However, dear readers, there was light coming to us in those days that we did not expect. I will be posting the next blog about how we built our tiny home. How we survived the coldest winter yet without any electricity. How Christ nose-dived into our life, and about the small CULT that we were a part of for the first year and a half of our journey to the Lord. Until next time, Much Love sent your way!

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