Our Inspired Journey

We started house hunting six years ago, and even had a few offers on some homes we liked right before God changed OUR plan and called us to Illinois.  I'm so glad He did.  Our time in Illinois was like a life-breath for us.  There were moments in those 3 years when it hurt to breathe in and trust in the plan He unfolded, but there is no doubt about it....His design for our family while in Illinois...adding two girls to our family and learning of Cole's deafness, was like a GUST of life-giving air as He used it all to draw us into a closeness we'd never known before.  Pain is strange.  What the enemy intends for our destruction, God uses for our good and His glory.  Beauty from ashes, if in HIS hands.

We've been back in California for 3 years now, and have been looking for a home ever since.  God provided a great place for us to rent in the meantime, but even so, John and I felt compelled to pray for a place of our own AND with a little more space for our growing four. :)

I was reminded that night that God wants to hear my heart and my desires.  One of my favorite scriptures since high school has been Psalm 37:4  "Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart."  I really liked the last part...getting the desires of my heart!  It's only been in the last few years that I've tasted the "delight" God talks about and now I see why He wrote it the way He did.  True "delight" is intoxicating.  It gives me chills just to whisper His name...to think of how He loves me.  To delight means HE is my desire.  I want for nothing else.  I truly feel that.  All else feels trivial.  And out of that place is where I prayed...enthralled with the GIVER much more than the gift.

For the next few weeks, John and I asked God to open the door to make THIS house our home.  We saw the potential for our family and for those who He'd bring HIS way in these walls.  No more passionless prayers coming from a place of defeat.  It felt like every other sentence in our house was a prayer for this house.  We were praying for a miracle.  We always KNEW he could do anything, but now we believed that our desires for this place may actually be HIS desire for us too!  And if it was…we didn't want anything to stand in our way.

The next few weeks were a blur.  We made an offer...a low offer, but an offer we could afford.  After many counter offers and back and forth, we really felt we were supposed to stick to the offer God had given us and not go stretching for provision.  Even small stretches made it feel like we were trying to do this in our own strength rather than trusting that God would provide.  The buyers walked away from us at a point, re-listed the house at a lower price hoping to gain more interest, but in the end, they came back to ours as the best offer.  That is GOD!  It was SUCH a gift knowing we were right where God wanted us to be.  The desire to "make it happen" in our own strength was a temptation, but what JOY is it to trust in Jesus!  We closed escrow right after Halloween, and moved in a week later.

John and his friends got right in, scraping ceilings and painting walls.  In a few short days, we moved all our belongings over to our new place, one mile away from our old one.  We chose to move when we could get help…at night, once friends were off of work.  So they moved our beds first, and as the couches, fridge and everything else big was being moved, I tried to tuck my kids into bed in our new place.  Not exactly the picture perfect way for it all to happen, but eventually we were in!