Jaw pain is GONE - PTL and all housing documents are not yet ready.

Hours before I sent out the prayer request yesterday the pain at the joint of my jaw on the right side was getting steadily worse.

I had prayed the best I could.

I had massaged the area.

The pain was between the skin of my cheek and the inside of my mouth.

It was hard to isolate and sometimes it was in different spots of that area.

I was concerned that I would not be able to sleep last night.

I had briefly imagined going to the doctor today to get painkillers and tests.

Thankfully my Medicare and health insurance began at the beginning of April.

Shortly after I sent out the prayer request the pain decreased unto zero.

I slept well last night.

This morning I remembered a few times that I heard a pop in that area when I chewed. But that was months ago and not recently.

SO I make another prayer request for the ongoing protection of my jaw joint.

I hope this is not the first sign of TMJ. I plan to live for 2 to 3 more decades. I do not want that kind of pain anymore.

DOCUMENTS

My patience has been S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-D.

Getting ready for the meeting at the Dallas Housing Authority has taken me down twisting paths.

I have been at this for more than 7 hours and I am not yet finished!

It is so easy to write on the housing authority annual recertification form to bring this list of documents. This includes bank statements, utility bills, income statements, and more.

IF this was 20 plus years ago then I would ONLY need to go to the statements that had been MAILED to me. BUT I went paperless since it was first offered.

Darlene took me to the public library to access their printer. I had imagined that I could print out all the documents in 10 to 15 minutes. But I could not access my accounts. The passwords to each account were saved on the Chrome browser and I had them backed on index cards.

SO I then I went home to go online to put ALL those on PDFs. That seemed simple at first. But many of the providers hid such data behind lots of menu options.

Even when I found the data it was complicated to get all of them converted to PDFs.

After church on Sunday, I went to the home of a friend. There were issues to get his computer to read the PDFs on my flash drive. Then finally 33 pages were printed.

This is Monday and I found that about a third of those pages were just legal fine print.

Plus as I looked very closely at what was required there are still a few documents missing. I need to go dig out 3 more sets of data to put on PDFs.

I have asked a neighbor to use his printer and he has agreed. But that is after I dig them out.

PRINTER

Please pray that in due season God will provide a printer for me. If you have a used printer that is collecting dust and you want to give it to me, then let me know. Otherwise, pray for God to provide the money right on time. I rarely need a printed but when I do it is USUALLY easy to get to the library.

TIMING

I had one week to get all this together. I get so little mail that I go days without checking it. Thankfully I got this letter the day it arrived.

There is a bolded sentence on the paperwork that says, Failure to attend this appointment will result in termination of your housing assistance.

Note they did not call or email me to find if I was available. They set told me when to be there. I could have been out of town, sick, or at a job that did not let me take off.

I guess so many people have abused the system that they must have all this documentation. And like the times I have helped various people navigate aid from agencies the caseworkers were always overworked with far too many clients to serve gracefully.

I understand and I forgive. But if I was still leaning on alcohol to cope with my upsets, like I was in college, then I would have gotten drunk a few times by now due to the big bumps on this path.

PRAYER

Please pray that I get ALL the documents printed.

May I fill out ALL the places on the 17-page packet properly.

May the meeting with at the housing authority go smoothly for me and Darlene. I just need to get approved for another year and she has several questions to be answered.

CONCLUSION

On one hand, I apologize that this message is so long. On the other hand, I am passing through a complex set of difficulties. I need targeted prayers.

THANKS again for ALL  your prayers.

Shalom

John