The Lucky "3"?

That old Tom Petty song just keeps rolling through my head--you take it on faith, you take it to the heart; the waiting is the hardest part. Evidently in Israel, if you don't speak the language and you don't yell to get your way, you are pushed to the bottom of the priority list. I've been in my apartment two weeks now and I still don't have gas hooked up for my stove. I still don't have my washer hooked up, and I'm still waiting for my landlady to take away the old furniture so that I can move in my new stuff. Needless to say it goes against every Southern bone in my body to yell at perfect strangers, so I wait.

On the upside, I think that my favorite thing about Jerusalem so far is Shabat (the Sabbath). Every day, King George Street is filled with cars, buses, and angry (or at least very impatient) taxi drivers honking their way through. Sidewalks are also very busy and stores are really crowded. Then on Friday morning, there's a mad rush to get everything done before Shabat begins, but around two o'clock in the afternoon, things start slowing down. Shops start closing. People start going home. The street gets much quieter. And then at sundown, a horn blows for about a minute and a half to signal the start of the day of rest, and I breathe a big sigh of relief!

Today I enjoyed that peace so much as I spent time the park that's adjacent to my apartment and then came in to take a nice leisurely nap. It felt so good to rest. I think that's something that we Americans really miss out on because we are too busy to just stop for a while and enjoy a day of doing nothing. That's what Jesus meant when He said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. God knows how much we need to stop and rest before starting the crazyness all over again.

Well, tomorrow I start the waiting game again. I've been sleeping on the bed that came with the apartment. It's actually two twin beds pushed together and they are so wobbly that I swear they are conspiring to throw me out onto the cold, hard tile floor one night. So I bought a new bed a few days ago and it's supposed to be delivered tomorrow between 10:00 and 2:00. Which probably means that it will show up some time around 3:00 or 4:00. Which means that I can't go anywhere until they get here.

And it's been really interesting so far that for everything that I've had delivered, I tell them to not come in the front of the building, but to come down the side by the park to my private entrance. It doesn't matter. Every time they still go in the front and climb a lot of stairs, and then call me and tell me to open the door (if they speak any English), when they're actually not in front of my door at all. But I usually find them and it works out sooner or later. I can see where they would get confused though --even though my mail box in the front of the building says "Apt. 24", there's actually a "3" on my front door. I don't understand. When I asked my landlady why there was a 3 and not a 24, she said that someone had told her about Feng Shui and that 3 was a lucky number, so she put a 3 on the door.

So far, 3 hasn't been that lucky for me.