Grateful
I am sitting in my house right now in a state of extreme gratefulness. I look around and can honestly say I love my home. I love where I live and I am at peace. Everything just fits, and it makes my heart sing. God is good, and he is faithful to those who will believe him.
Back story; I am one and a half months into a relocation. About two years ago God impressed upon me that we would be moving and that we needed to prepare our home for selling. This excited me very much because for a while we wanted to sell our home and move to a new location in town, someplace closer to our daily activities. I assumed in ‘all my spiritual knowledge’ that we would be moving very soon. My husband and I began preparing our home for the sale.
It was hard work, and more money than we wanted to spend, but nevertheless this is what we felt God was saying. When our preparations were finished we put the house on the market with excitement. After months of people coming in and out of our home the excitement waned . . . who am I kidding, disappeared! We were tired and frustrated. No buyer after five months and Christmas was fast approaching. We took the house off the market.
In the months that followed we were bewildered, discouraged, and quite honestly angry. We thought we’d heard God! What in the world was going on? Here we are in a new year, and while everyone is excited and rejoicing about the new proclamations our Pastor has uttered, I was saying . . .whatever! Out of faithfulness and dedication to our church and our leaders, we did our best and got on board.
One other thing that was going on is that for a few years my husband had been trying to find a job that would offer him a better opportunity for advancement, to no avail. After running into many dead ends we gave up on that too. Then something interesting happened. Three months into the new year my husband was on a business trip and a former coworker presented him with a job offer. She told him if he was interested she wanted to put his name in for it. He told me about it and we pretty much dismissed it because it meant relocating to a state that got lots of snow. I wasn’t having that after living two decades in a snow-free zone.
A few weeks later I started to feel like we needed to check into this job. I couldn’t shake it. My husband felt it too so we talked about it. We never thought about leaving our state, we simply thought we were moving closer to the city. Accepting a job somewhere else was not even a thought. Are you starting to see where this is headed? Yeah, so were we. After going back to God in prayer my husband and I knew he was supposed to apply for the job.
Now, back to the beginning. After almost two years I now sit in my new house, in my new state where my husband has his new job and we are blessed. I cannot tell you in the space of this blog post all the amazing things that happened to bring us to where we are now. Things that were never on our radar or in our minds have happened with our family. God things, good things, that only he could have orchestrated. It would take about 10 pages to do that. We are in this place now not because we are so spiritual and wonderful. Not because we handled everything with perfect patience and grace.
We are here because God had perfect patience and grace.
We are here because we dared to do what he said to do, get the house ready to sell. We are in this place because even through tears, anger, and frustration we believed God. We didn't always know how he was going to do what he said, but we believed he would do what he said. Some day, some way we knew he would. If you continue to listen to him he will give clues along the way that let you know you are on the right track. He was faithful to do that for us. Sometimes we don't necessarily doubt God, we doubt ourselves. We say I guess I just didn’t hear God accurately. The enemy of our soul, Satan, will help sell that line of thinking to all of us. Unfortunately, we sometimes buy it. His desire is that you lose faith and trust in the God who loves you and is always for you.
So today I sit writing this blog knowing that yes, we heard God. It didn't happen anywhere near what I or my husband expected, but boy did it happen. If you know you are hearing from God, and what you hear is in line with His Holy Word, stand your ground. He will do it in his timing, in his way, of that you can be assured.
Oh and by the way, yes the other house sold, forty days after we put it back on the market. God and those forties!
Note: We have been in our new location for five years now. Within these five years, my husband has received two promotions. Still blessed, still loving it. God is Good.