Month: September 2009

A few more details before the house hunting story…

Before telling Josh that we were moving, I knew I needed to arm myself with information on the colleges there. I jumped on the computer and looked up Huntsville colleges. I found one (UAH) that offers a graduate program in Josh’s favorite field of study: Bio-genetics. It looks like a very good program. Also just recently a large Biotechnology Institute called Hudson Alpha moved to Huntsville (a possible place of future employment). They are currently working on a swine flu vaccine among other things.

Josh responded to the news with just one sentence “When are ya’ll leaving?” First I swelled with pride at my Texan offspring using the word “ya’ll” so aptly. Then I was quickly over taken with fear that Josh wouldn’t make this one last (I hope) move with us. I asked him to at least prayerfully think about moving with us and to look over the information I found.

I forgot to mention in my first moving post that a few days after Mike was offered the job in Huntsville everything fell apart at his job in Montgomery. Some higher ups decided that his office was redundant and to cut all the leadership positions (including Mike’s and his two bosses). Only a few people there were going to actually be able to relocate to another office in Montgomery.. everyone else was going to have to find a new job, house, life… We were so relieved to have the Huntsville offer and praying all the more that the job would workout.

The move began feeling more like God was yanking us out of the pit.. and thrusting us into “Rocket City” than normal gentle leading. The office in Huntsville was anxious to have Mike start and got the initial paper work done at lightening speed. We had three buyers in just one week. Josh was granted favor and was able to transfer to UAH even though he was one credit short. Mike just happened to have scheduled months before a 2 week class in Huntsville. He was able to get some preliminary house hunting done in the evenings after class and keep me up dated via the internet on our choices.

It takes a while to get acclimated to a new city and find out where what is, how long it takes to get from here to there, and where a good area to live is. Mike worked really hard to study the situation and to try to decide what was most important to us in finding a house. Location is always key. This time we needed to not only to be a reasonable commute from work but also from Josh’s college. Together we cut his list down from 60 to 10 houses for me to chose from.

I drove up for the weekend in between week one and two of his class. We went to see Mike’s top 10 or so houses and in the end didn’t have peace about any of the houses. They were either too run down, not in a good location or too expensive. We were very discouraged and very apprehensive about making a bid on a house that would eat up most of Mike’s new raise.

Sunday was our last chance.. Mike had to start back to class on Monday and I needed to get home and get ready for the movers. We decided to check into building as a last resort. We had seen a new home on the opposite side of town from where we wanted to live that we liked and decided to try searching on line for other neighborhoods by that builder. We found a neighborhood that was about a mile West of where Mike had decided was as far as he wanted to commute. We drove to the model home after lunch, but they weren’t scheduled to open for another hour. So we drove by our top three houses one last time; one that was too expensive, one in a bad location and one that was a steal but that would need more repairs and upgrades than we could afford (the master bedroom had a mauve bath tub, tile, countertops etc… and the kid’s bathroom hunter green).

We’ve never built before and it was a scary thought. We knew nothing about building a house. We were afraid that the price would start out looking good but then rise over our heads in hidden cost. We sat down in a model home with the builder’s representative and asked all kinds of questions. Cheryl was very kind, patient, and helpful with all our questions. She had been working with the builder for many years and had a house in the neighborhood herself. So much info to cover in so little time. We left with our heads swimming to go look at the lot we thought we might like by the “lake”.

Mike at peace on our land.

As we stood on the lot I felt peace and joy over take me. All of Mike’s concerns about the commute, money, temporary housing and storage disappeared. He was like a whole new person. I wasn’t sure what to think about the sudden change .. but we had finally found the peace we were looking for. We fell in love with a piece of land. We called Cheryl and asked her to hold the lot for us and made an appointment for the next day for me to work out the details.

It may be hard to believe but there is more to the story. 🙂 And you wonder why I don’t blog more..

We put our house on the market just in time for the July 4 holiday weekend thinking that we wouldn’t have offers for weeks and not actually having moving orders wouldn’t be a problem. Getting an offer the first day on the market made us anxious that we might loose our buyers to another house before we got the paper work and made us wonder if or not we should just sell it and forget about the home-sell buy-out program Mike had fought for and won. I know… there we go again not trusting God.

We were expecting our papers on Friday and had told the buyers so on Wednesday. Then after many phone calls, we discovered that it would be weeks after we got the orders before we could sell the house with the buy-out program. Uhrugg!

After much deliberation, we decided to trust God with the buyers and not give up our buy-out program. It would have cost us thousands of dollars more to sell the house with out it. The buyers would have to decide if or not our house was worth waiting for and we would have to trust God to bring us another buyer if they walked. We basically had to put them off indefinitely… they might very well not be able to move in until after school started. That was hard..

To add to our fears, on Friday, our air conditioner stopped working. We tried a couple of things to fix it and hoped it would work better the next day after a nights rest. It didn’t and we suffered through Saturday unwilling to call out a repair man on holiday pay. Finally, on Sunday it still was not working and we had to call someone. Thankfully we had had them come out before the summer season for a check up (sound judgment and wisdom) and got a reasonable price on the repair. Funny how we spent that weekend hoping no one would come see the house while the air wasn’t working after working so hard to get it on the market in time for that weekend.

Friday, Monday and Tuesday dragged on endlessly and there were still no orders in sight. It turned out that the lady that was in charge of putting our orders together was on vacation (how dare she take a summer vacation) and her replacement was not returning our calls and e-mails.

On Tuesday, I watched an episode where Joseph Prince was teaching on the story of Ruth. It was really good. Do you remember how Ruth’s closer relative chose not to redeem her because it would ruin his inheritance? Ruth was a Mobite and by law couldn’t receive an inheritance from God (Israel) so their children would not have received an inheritance.

Boaz was the son of Rahab the harlot from Jericho so he had already experienced God’s grace and favor and become very rich. He experienced what the law could not and through grace and God’s favor Boaz redeemed Ruth.

The part of the story really spoke to me was where the closer relative had to give his shoe to Boaz. It’s a picture of him giving up his rights to take possession. Everywhere our foot steps we are to take possession of the land. The closer relative was a picture of the law. He couldn’t bend to redeem her and still be the law. Jesus redeemed us just like Boaz redeemed Ruth and now the law has no rights over us.

Joseph Prince talked through the Bible about shoes and feet to confirm the idea. Moses is also a picture of the law. The first thing God spoke to him was to take off his shoes…

One of the shoe examples was in the story of the prodigal son. He was given shoes to possess the land when he returned to his father. The shoe thread through the Bible was very beautiful.

God told me to put on my shoes and take possession of the land He was giving me. So, I put on my shoes and took possession of the paper work. We’d already had over a weeks delay and were being promised even a longer delay.

The next morning, the orders came through and after Mike made one phone call letting the person in charge of the buy-out program know that we had a buyer the papers were all expedited and completed in one day instead of the promised weeks. God is so good!

The delay in paper work only worked for our good in that it gave the opportunity for two more people to make bids on the house!

God worked everything to our good! He made it so that the first bank appraiser couldn’t come but so that the second appraiser came right before I started taking apart my house to pack it and helped our realtor help him by finding good comps so that it would actually appraise for the great offer we received instead of the Zillow appraisal price.

Next I’ll tell you about buying a house..

Then one of our pastors said that God was going bless His people with good sound judgement. Mike caught it in his Spirit and held on to it. Soon after, he felt an urgency to start looking for jobs. I think at one point there were 9 different jobs that he had applied for that he could hear back from at any moment.

It’s kinda fun to dream about where you might get to live next.. but at the same time it’s hard to live the life you have at that moment. Should you spend money on this or save it for the move? Should you plan a vacation when you might be moving that same week? Should you invest in a new friendship when you might have to move just as you’re getting to know that person?

We’ve lived many months.. years in reality.. with things on hold because we might move. I didn’t want to live that way this time. I asked Mike, “Are you sure you really want to do this: you have a nice job, you get to come home for lunch everyday, and I like our life here???” I know. I know. That’s the devil’s line. “Did God really say..?” He kept applying while I worked really hard to ignore the possibility of moving so that I could enjoy where I was.

Mike normally only looks for Air Force jobs because he’s been with them for a long time and it makes the transition easier. One day, he heard God say to look in Huntsville for a job. When he looked, he found a job that he was really interested in and applied. If he had waited one day before obeying God, he would have missed his chance because it was the last day that they were taking applications. He interviewed for the job before our TX trip. We didn’t hear anything for a long time.

I started the summer looking forward to a relaxing time of catching up on school work, painting a couple of rooms in our house, and spending a lot of time in the pool. My plan was to ignore the whole moving thing and enjoy my summer. Mike gave up the Huntsville job and started bugging me with the idea that a job in D.C. was more likely to work out and was I OK with moving to DC?

Do you know what it feels like to have so many things on your heart that if you prayed for them all that you would explode? I was trying to ignore my heart and the possibility of moving, when God opened a little window into my soul and showed me that I really wanted to move to Huntsville and I was not OK with moving to D.C. any longer.

I said, “OK, God.. I wanted to be OK with moving to DC, I was OK at one point, but I am not any more. You made me want to move to Huntsville. Now I want to move to Huntsville. Give me the desire of my heart and quit playing around with me. Are we moving or not? Did you say we were going to move or was that my mind playing tricks on me? I am tired of playing around. You need to show me one way or the other!”

That day Mike was offered the job in Huntsville and all my plans for a nice relaxing summer slipped away. I was shocked. I jumped up and down for joy. I think we both walked around in disbelief for a couple of days. Mike was offered the highest dollar amount that they were legally able to offer him in the promotion, then when he asked they also enrolled him in the home-sale buy-out program which was not originally part of the deal. God is so good!