The Story of the House

Last summer we decided that if I was hired permanently at the school board, then we would list our house and move 'into town'. We have lived in 'the country' for the past 11 1/2 years. We felt that with our children being older now and our lives getting busier that moving into town would make things simpler.

I did get hired permanently last September and we planned to list our home in March. At the end of November I found the perfect house. I drove a young girl home that was visiting our church. She was a student from Asia and was billeting with a family in our city. I drove her to a street that I had never been on before. I decided I really liked the street and would like to live on it and noticed that there happened to be a house For Sale. I told my husband about this 'new street discovery'. We checked out the house on-line, discovered that a Real Estate Agent from our church had it listed and went to see it. We loved it. It was a two-storey four-bedroom home, pretty on the outside, situated on the inside of a cul-de-sac, had a double garage, a pool and a hot tub. Everything I wanted!

Mark prayed about it and consulted a couple of friends and they confirmed the price that he felt we were to spend. We put in an offer. Back and forth it went until it was accepted.....at $20,000 more than Mark originally had felt we were to pay for the house. We weren't too concerned because we still felt that this was to be our home.

We then listed our house and planned for it to sell right away. We had hoped to be in our new home before Christmas. Okay... I wanted to be in before Christmas, or at least by Mark's birthday on February 2nd.

I started to feel a little unsure about how much we were going to be spending on this house. But that didn't stop me from envisioning our life there. I asked God to not let us have it if our offer had been too high. I didn't want us to go broke buying it.

By the middle of January someone else had come in with an offer on the house that we wanted and it was no longer ours. I was a little miffed at first. I began to question whether or not I had really heard from God. I was positive that this was supposed to be our new home. I began to lose interest in selling.

We kept watching the housing market as new houses were listed. I really wanted a house with a pool. Mark had bought me an above-ground pool two years ago for Mothers' Day and I really didn't want to leave it behind.

In March we decided that we needed to ask God for a deadline. We were getting discouraged. We told our realtor that we would leave our home listed until May 1st.

Within two weeks of our deadline our home sold and on a sunny Saturday in April we found our new house. Our realtor took us through a few homes that day. We pulled onto one street and while we waited for our realtor, I got out of the car and visited with a couple that were setting up for a garage sale. I knew that they were the new senior pastors of our 'mother church'. I introduced myself and told them we were looking at 2 homes on their street. I was concerned that they may get their hopes up for us to buy there because I felt that this was not the area that I wanted to live. My intention was that we were just looking at the houses on this street to eliminate all possibilities before we found our home.


Little did I know that our new home would be on this particular street. Our new home has everything that we were excited about in the first house that we had planned to buy. It is a two-storey four-bedroom house, pretty on the outside, situated on the inside of a cul-de-sac, has a double garage, an in-ground pool and a better hot-tub. It also has a massive master suite and four bathrooms!!

I absolutely love our new house and our new location. God has scripted us something better than we could have done on our own. And, the price we paid is the original amount that God had told Mark to spend.