Inspired by the Garbage Disposal

Yesterday I was cleaning up the kitchen and as I flipped on the garbage disposal it kind of spit on my face. Nice visual huh?  As I was trying NOT to think about just how gross that is, I recalled the days of our seminary apartment.  We lived out in Seminary Housing at Bethel for our first 3 years of marriage.  Those were great years.  We had a really nice apartment on the corner of Bethel where we had a beautiful view of Lake Valentine out of one bedroom and the privacy of the woods/lake out of the other windows.  We enjoyed the simplicity of apartment living and lower utility bills during those years.  I especially appreciated that Ross was so close by for all of his classes and studying in the library.  During some of those years I was working as many as 4 jobs, so his short commute was ideal.

I believe our seminary apartment had a garbage disposal but it most definitely did NOT have a dishwasher.  I am grateful for all of the time we spent chatting while we did the piles of dishes together during those first years of marriage.  However, as I was about to get frustrated with the garbage disposal spitting on my face yesterday, I was reminded of how thankful I am to have a working dishwasher.   It is amazing to fill it up, hit a button, and about an hour later have a very clean load of dishes ready to be put away.  We're having a large group of people over tonight - Ross's staff from Campus Min - and it will be so nice to fill up the dishwasher and not spend HOURS cleaning and drying and putting everything away.  This also leads me down the trail of remembering how painful it was to spend money doing our laundry when we lived at Sem.  It is such a beautiful thing to have a washer and dryer right outside of our bedrooms. While we pay for utilities and we purchased those machines, we don't have to have a pile of quarters ready to go and we can also leave our stuff in there and not worry about 'tying up the machine'.  Ah!  Bliss!

We are coming up on the 3rd anniversary of being homeowners and I am still so very thankful for some of these luxuries we now have in this home.