Our Home - Part One :)

I wanted to share with y'all the story of how we bought our home.  I know, it sounds boring, and it probably IS boring to some, but to us, it is amazing.  It's a testimony of how God works things out when we trust Him.  It's my hope that this will encourage at least ONE person.  This will be three parts, so if you end up reading this, stay tuned.  :)


Let's rewind to May of 2010.  Sweet M had just turned one month old, and we were trying to adjust to our new life. It was very difficult for me though.  I have a hard time dealing with life-altering changes, but at the same time, I suppose a lot of people do.  Anyway, around this time, other things started changing.  My husband considered applying for another job in town.  This was pretty surprising, but I didn't mind what he did because I wanted him to be happy.  He ended up not getting that job, but I believe that this was the first step in pointing us in a new direction.  

We were also attending a large church in town that I LOVED.  I mean seriously loved.  I really enjoyed going and looked forward to it every week.  At this point, we were only making it to Sunday morning service because we had a newborn, but I enjoyed it nonetheless!  One Sunday, J mentioned that he really liked our church, but he missed going to a smaller one.  I wasn't surprised that he felt that way, because although he really liked the church too, I think I enjoyed it more.  Well, once he said this, I began to see his point.  I still loved our church, but I began to feel like maybe we should be in a smaller place where we would know everyone.  That seems to be more of our style anyway.  This really bothered me, because we had finally found a place I loved, and here I was starting to feel somewhat convicted about switching again.  I was afraid I wouldn't be strong enough to leave this church to go to a different one in town.  We had already visited several of them and I didn't like any of them nearly as much.  Our greatest desire is to do what the Lord wants us to do though, so I wanted to follow Him.  I decided to not worry about it too much until the Lord led us elsewhere.

A little bit of background on my husband and I for those who don't know:  We both grew up in the country (in separate towns) and LOVED it.  We lived away from town and enjoyed it.  We were used to having to drive a ways to get to a Walmart or anything like it.  We have always known that we wanted to have some land of our own one day in the country.  I knew it might not happen, and that if it did, we may be in our 60's or 70's before we could afford to make this dream come true. In the town where we were previously living, we were renting a nice house on the edge of town in a neighborhood.  It wasn't the way we wanted to live forever, but we planned on being there several years, and we really loved our town. We both desired our own home in the country of course, but J desired it most of all.  He's very outdoorsy.  The man LOVES to be outside and to work on things out there.  He liked our home as well, but he didn't have the space or freedom to do the things outside he wanted.  I know it sounds silly, but to me, it really seemed like he was like a caged bird in some ways.  Because of this, he always enjoyed looking at land for sale online.  He had been looking just for fun for years, and occasionally he would show me something that looked really nice.  (He's so cute.)

One evening, I was dying to get out of the house, and we had a gift card to a grocery store in another town nearby (we'll call it 'Townville',  just for privacy reasons).  We decided to make a fun trip out of it and go to this town that we had never visited.  While we were driving out there, we noticed the land was very pretty, and the town was small.  After we bought our groceries, we went home, and that was that.  Or so I thought.

A few nights later after M was in bed, he called me into the office and showed me a house for sale in Townville.  It was an old house--built in the 40's.  The pictures of it weren't impressive, but it was a really good price and had a good portion of land.  I just kinda humored him, nodding my head and saying "Oh yeah, that's cool."  I figured it was just another one of those times he was showing me something for the fun of it.  


Wrong again.  


Before I knew it, he suggested that we go take a look at the house.  I was all for this, because I was excited for any excuse to leave the house.  So M took a nap in the car seat while we took our drive out to this house.  Upon first sight, I still wasn't very impressed.  It's not that it looked bad--it was cute in some ways, but it needed some cleaning up.  The grass was tall and there were a lot of fences and weeds.  We looked around a little bit and then headed home.  As we drove home, we talked about it a little bit, and I realized that we were seriously discussing the possibility of buying this house.  

I think it’s important to note that we were content where we were living.  We weren’t looking for something because we were miserable or disliked our home.  The reason I think it’s important to tell y’all that is because it shows you even more that THIS WAS ALL GOD!  

We discussed the pros and cons of buying the house.  We even made a list!  It would definitely be something we had to put a lot of work into, but it had a lot of potential.  It was in a small town out in the country on several acres of land, which was the dream.  There was a school nearby that had a VERY good reputation, and we had already had some concerns about where M would go to school one day.  We'd have to pay for the down-payment and everything that goes along in the process of buying a house, but we were already 'throwing away' a chunk of money on rent.  I was terrified at the idea of moving in general, because moving is SO difficult.  We had only lived at our home for almost a year, and I SO didn't want to pack up and move AGAIN.  I was so exhausted and hated the idea of packing WHILE taking care of a newborn.  I worried about how I would handle the whole process emotionally as well as physically.  I worried about J not finding a job in Townville and having stay in our old town at his old job, which was almost an hour away.  I was worried about EVERYTHING.  (Keep in mind that we're still only in May, so I'm still emotional from giving birth!)  We decided that the best thing we could do was just pray and ask the Lord for wisdom and guidance.  

To be continued... ;)

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