As expected, life gets in the way of blogging.

I think about blogging often, but usually it’s when I’m in the middle of cooking dinner, or knee deep in mediating an argument between the kiddos, or chauffeuring one of my clan somewhere.  I have lots of ideas, things I know I can and should get out of my head and down in words for me to look back on if nothing else, to remember how and why and what I was feeling as I walked through this season or that….perhaps someday I will get to it all, but for now, this blog seems to get the highs and lows of this crazy life because that’s what I have time for.

This one is a high…and amazing testimony of the goodness of God, an orchestration of our story that only HE could have made happen.  It’s a little bit of a complicated story, so hopefully it makes sense….

A tiny bit of backstory: after a devastating time of financial hardship and poor decisions nine years ago, we began renting a house.  It seemed like a logical choice (until the first time the power went out and it rained…..)and in spite of the many issues we had there, it definitely served the needs of our family as well as multiple foster kiddos for many years.  We lived there for seven years and moved in a hurry nearly two years ago, jumping at the first home which would fit our family that we could find after our rental home flooded for the fifth or sixth time, ruining lots of our furniture.  We had hope that this home would be a permanent move, the landlady was friendly to our desire to buy down the road, and had it written into our lease to have the first “right of purchase”, though it was not a true rent to own.  It became apparent within the first six months or so that this home was not for us to be in forever for  variety of reasons.  Fast forward eighteen months into the lease….

So this past winter/spring we began tinkering with the idea of purchasing a home and looked around a little bit just to see what was out there in our area and price range, to see if it was possible.  We walked through just a few homes, one of which we fell in love with right away.  It had absolutely everything we had hoped for – both on our “have to have” list as well as our “would be nice to have” list and had been on the market for a really long time.  We loved the house, but shortly after walking through we saw it was taken off the market and figured it was not meant to be.

We were fully in faith that God would open or close doors and very much submitted to what He wanted for us, knowing that being in the will of Jesus is the only way to have peace.

We ended up putting the idea of buying on hold – after a couple roadblocks came up which would take a few months to work out as well as wanting to save more for a down payment – and resigned ourselves to renting for a bit longer.

We hoped to simply extend our lease for a few months, but when we were told that wasn’t an option and in fact we were released from our lease as soon as we would like, we began looking for a short term rental.  In the process of the house search, I “accidentally” stumbled upon a photo of the house we really loved from our walk through back in the winter.  It was listed “for sale by owner” and there was an email on the listing.

Ryan and I decided it couldn’t hurt to reach out to the owner of the house and take the risk to explain our situation and ask her if she would at all consider working with us on a land contract/rent to own type of agreement, knowing that the worst that could happen is she say that she wasn’t interested and only wanted to sell or that she just wouldn’t reply.  She immediately replied that YES, she was happy to work with us and we began negotiations.  The owner has been amazing to us.  She is willing to work with us on absolutely everything we have asked and has offered us terms of the agreement that are better than we could have asked for.  The contract has been drawn up by an attorney, a moving date has been set and we are in awe and so, so very excited.

We are watching the doors fly wide open and it’s so exciting, humbling and overwhelming to see God work giving us the desires of our heart.

In just under three weeks, this is going to be our new home.

We are thrilled.  That word seems like an understatement considering how we feel right now but I don’t have the words to explain how I feel seeing God orchestrate every step of this situation….thrilled, blessed, humbled, etc.  We can’t wait to be truly HOME in a place we can make our own.

P.S. (Shameless plug/request for help) Anyone who wants to help us move on Saturday July 22nd or help me pack anytime before that, we would LOVE the extra hands…just get ahold of us for the details. 🙂