I'll share how our dream became a nightmare at a later date, but now it seems like the nightmare is dissipating, and dreams are back in our lives again.
For the past three years, we have been renting from Hubby's sis. She has been anxious to sell her house, but has graciously held off until we found a place. We have been searching for three years hoping to find a place where we could finally settle. We've been to umpteen thousand (it seems) sheriff's sales, auctions, and foreclosures. Each place seemed like a good place, and usually nearly perfect for what we needed and wanted to accomplish. But, every place, for one reason or another (usually because we were outbid) went to someone else.
We trusted in the Lord, sometimes got a little discouraged with the Lord, trusted some more, asked, begged, and pleaded; questioned, and trusted some more.
Last Fall, our prayers began to be answered. A friend had mentioned that she passed an empty house every day on her way to work. But, we were busy with other things (mostly canning and Hubby working out of state) and forgot about it. A couple weeks later, she asked if we had checked it out. This time we hopped in the car and went looking for it.
As soon as we pulled into the driveway, we started to get that warm, fuzzy feeling of first love. A little hopeful, but afraid to think about the possibilities in case nothing came of it. Mind you, this place has a face only a mother could love, but we saw great potential. We started peering into each window like peeping Toms, and excitement grew with each glimpse. (Don't worry the house was empty.) Usually, when you look inside a foreclosure, you'll find that it either has been trashed, or is full of mold, or crumbling walls that it would need to be gutted in order to be made liveable again. But not this little gem. We walked around the house, peering into each window for another glimpse. With each glimpse, we fell more and more in love. The walls were all in tact, there was no animal feces lying around, the rooms were spacious. The outside needed more work than the inside.
It's in the country but close to town, which we wanted; it has acreage, which we wanted; it has an office area, which we wanted; a basement, a decent-sized kitchen. We checked everything off our mental list. We would have preferred a 3-bedroom, but we could manage with a 2-bedroom. The road is a little busy, and the view across the road is not too appealing, but before we left, we had already started making plans on how to solve that problem, and Hubby had already envisioned how and where he was going to lay out our garden, blue blueberry and raspberry bushes, and where the beef cow, pig and chickens would go.
We called our realtor and asked him to find out what he could on the house. We had no idea how much patience we would be needing. We had no idea how much we would see God working in this process. He was with us all the way.
To be continued....
