When Things Got Real Part 2

About a month after starting BSF we sold our house and moved. It was a crazy, hectic, frustrating experience. We had a buyer for our house very quickly but finding a new house proved to be quite a chore. We looked at a lot of houses and had a list of our favorites in order of liking. Every time we found a house we liked well enough to live in something would happen. Our offer would get accepted and then cancelled for a better one, we had one house where the owner chose an offer of less money than we were offering, one house our realtor sat on the offer until the next day (in a very busy market) and someone else snatched it up first. We even made an offer on a house that had been on the market for months with no offers, had dropped the price significantly, and even the neighbor had come during our walk through to ask us to please buy the house. Mysteriously, as soon as our offer was submitted it went under contract with someone else. The next one on our list dropped off the market before our offer could be sent in. So we ended up with only one house left on our list and a looming close date on our current house.

It was smaller than we wanted. Not in the school district I thought I wanted but it was at least assigned to a good elementary school, we could always move before high school. It was all we had left. Not much else was popping onto the market at the time and we didn’t want to be homeless. We offered and it was accepted. I couldn’t help but feel like we were led there, that all of these slamming doors were funneling us to this particular house for some weird reason. We finally had our new home.

We weren’t in our new home long before some less than great things came to light. Our lender calculated our taxes and escrow wrong by a long shot meaning, first of all, that the people we bought the house from did not pay in the correct amount to cover their portion of property taxes for the time they were in the house that year. Since we closed in October it was a good part of the year they owed for. We were told it was up to us to collect what they owed, meanwhile it came out of our escrow and left our account very much in the red. At about the same time, I found out that the school that we were so happy that our son would go to could possibly fill up and if so, our neighborhood would get bumped and re-assigned. The elementary he would be re-assigned to was very poorly rated and I was not happy one bit. We started having serious doubts about our choice to move here.

During this time, my son and I continued to attend BSF. I was feeling really down and stressed. Lots of worry and doubt clouded my mind almost constantly. The holidays were coming up and I was looking for a way to put my worries aside and enjoy Christmas in our new home. It was about this time that I was feeling a push to explore attending church for the first time. I had gotten a flyer in the mail for a church that was very convenient to our house, only about 2 miles away, but I was still really nervous about stepping out on my own. I had never been to a Christmas Eve service before and I thought I’d like to check it out. I wasn’t having any luck convincing anyone to go with me though. Then I mentioned it to my sister-in-law, the same one who got me to try BSF, and she said they were actually planning to go to one. It just so happened to be at the church I was considering looking into. They just so happened to attend there. So they invited me along. I truly believe that there are no coincidences and God had worked through my sister-in-law once again because I very much enjoyed that service and I don’t know if I would have gone if I hadn’t been invited to go. Soon after I expressed to her that I wanted to begin going regularly and we worked out a weekend to go together so I didn’t have to feel like I was all alone in getting my son set up at the children’s program, in this new place full of strangers. That one Sunday was all I needed. We have attended regularly even though my brother’s family hasn’t been there since. It became my church home from the first sermon.

So many things that our pastor talked about hit me so hard. I did a lot of crying on those Sundays. The very first message I heard asked the question “Are you a disconnected believer or a connected disciple?” I realized the description of a “disconnected believer” was me, without a doubt. Disconnected believers were irrelevant to the Kingdom of God. I didn’t want to be irrelevant to the Kingdom! I began to absorb these teachings and could feel a definite change in how I thought and lived. Much less about me, I was so much more willing to put myself aside for others. 

-Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek His will in all you do, and He will show you which path to take. Proverbs 3:5-6


If anyone is interested in watching that first message that hit me so hard you can find it here:Hope Fellowship - Pruning