Our home-owning story

A year ago I never would have dreamt that we would own a home right now.  We had a very rough few years starting in about March of 2009.  Humor me with this.  In church right now we are learning how God always has an "upper story".  It's the story that you can't see when you are in the middle of your earthly experiences.  We get caught up in the "lower story" that we are living.  I think the last few years of our life have been exactly that...

Three years ago we found ourselves in a position we never thought we would be in...  We were stuck in an awful home loan on a house that wasn't worth half of what we paid for it.  We tried everything we could to work something out...  A modification, a short sale, a deed in lieu of foreclosure, but the bank would have none of it.  We ended up foreclosing on our home in June of 2011.  It was unbelievable.  My husband and I both have good jobs and we make good money, but one agonizing turn after another lead us to the only option we still had.  We moved out of our home and watched as the bank sold it for less than half of what we bought it for. 

None of it made sense.  We had done everything right.  We had jumped through every hoop, filled out every form and made hundreds of phone calls.  How could this have happened?  We were baffled and completely scarred by the entire experience.  We knew God was with us, but we were having a really hard time seeing Him through the mess.  This time forced us to examine our beliefs and tried our faith.  We learned to rest in the promise that God is faithful and we chose to believe He would make sense of this for us. 

We watched as home prices dropped, and dropped.  It was so hard to know we could buy a home for less than our rent, but we decided we would just have to wait it out.  A realtor friend had mentioned that owner financing was becoming more and more common, largely due to the foreclosure crisis and so many people being in our exact situation.  We started keeping our eye on homes available in our area.  But this time we planned to be patient.  We set our criteria for another home very high...  We wanted a very specific  area, the possiblility of owner financing, and preferably something with a little land.  A place we could make home for many years to come.  We also decided that if there was something out there God wanted us to buy, He would make it happen.  We weren't going to push.

Then one day that realtor friend found a property that we might be interested in.  It was an old farmhouse on 13 acres on one of the 3 streets we had specifically mentioned being especially einterested in.  We went to look at it and completely fell in love.  Matt's exact words were, "I really wanted to not like it."  But he did.  We both did. 

I went home and called my mom to tell her all about this beautiful property and the sweet owner we had met.  She was an elderly widow and we had the chance to meet her while we looked at the house.  She and Matt hit it off right from the start.  In fact he spent almost the entire time we were in her home talking to her instead of looking around.  Turns out she knew Matt's dad and they visited about her property and her plans when she moved out.  I kept saying the owner's name and telling my mom all about the place.  Then my mom said, "I think I know her, or at least her nephew that takes care of her." 

When we got off the phone, my mom called the nephew, and sure enough, it was exactly who she thought.  And believe it or not, she already had an appointment scheduled with the nephew the next morning.  At the appointment they talked about the property and how much Matt and I loved it.  The nephew invited my mom and dad to come out and have a look that Saturday, and if we wanted to, Matt and I could tag along.  Are you kidding?  If we wanted to?  We couldn't get to the weekend fast enough!

My parents loved it out there.  We walked nearly the entire 13 acres.  It was even better the further you went back from the road.  There were building sites all over the back of the property.  If Matt and I could make the 2 bedroom, 1100 square foot farmhouse work for our family of 6 for a few years, we could build another house on the property that would fit our family a little more comfortably.  Then we would have a rental, or more probably, a second home on our property for family members to live in (either of our parents, my grandmother) that would make them close enough for us to help out, but far enough for privacy. 

We wrote a letter to the owner and made an offer on Monday.  There was a lot of work to do...  The house is over 80 years old (probably more like 90) and it needs work, but Matt and I are not afraid of hard work.  We would be able to have chickens, raise a steer or a pig, and let our children run and play until their hearts content.  This is exactly what we had dreamed of.  Now we just waited and prayed.

She accepted our offer!!!  We were thrilled.  And 3 weeks later we had the keys and so began our farmhouse dream.

Only God could have taken us from a tiny home, mortgaged to the hilt and without hope of ever getting the money we had put in back out of our "investment" and put us in our dream location, on land better than either of us had ever dreamed, with possibilities beyond our imagination.  If Matt and I had sat down and come up with our own wishes for our future and the future of our children, we couldn't have dreamt anything this incredible.  This is a God story.  Only He could have written this, only He could have orchestrated the chain of events we lived the last three years that ended here.  This road has been hard, and I have been angry (sometimes even with God), hurt, troubled, and completely dumbfounded.  About the time I finally let go and trusted God with my story, He made it better than I ever could have.

This is the second time in my life where I spent months asking God what I had done to deserve something awful to happen to me.  I felt like I was getting punished for something, I just couldn't put my finger on what I had done that was so bad to deserve something like losing our home.  I mean, I'm a sinner, but just the little, normal sins...  How haughty of me!  How do I get trapped into thinking like that?  That every bad thing that happens is a direct result of something bad the individual did to deserve it.  I don't look at the lives of others like that, why do I fall into that kind of thinking in my own life?   

Now that I can see the "upper story" in my life, I'm not asking why I deserved to have something awful happen to me...  I am asking why God loves me so much that He would take my circumstances and change my hopeless situation into extraordinary.