Let God Choose Your House (1)

We let God choose our house.

We have done this several times. Each time we think we have learned the process from the previous time, but make life hard for ourselves by making the same mistakes again.

My wife bought her first house before we married. As a young adult, she and a friend were about to buy it together, but the friend got a boyfriend and went off to marry him instead. This was quite traumatic for my wife, bearing in mind she was only in her early twenties. She asked advice of her church pastor, who suggested that she could still buy the house on her own. He provided support while she negotiated the price, obtained a mortgage, dealt with solicitors, etc. Once she had moved in, she took on church friends as lodgers to help cover the costs. Over the next few years the value of the house doubled!

I came on the scene at this stage and married her. (Well, its one way to become a home owner!)

We started having babies and the house soon became too small. We put our house on the market and looked around for something meeting our budget and our need for somewhere big enough for our family plans. We searched for ages and eventually found one, and had our provisional offer accepted. But we still had not sold ours. This was hard because we were convinced that we should be moving, and were convinced that the house we had found was the right one. Eventually the house we wanted was taken off the market and rented out to someone else. We were still convinced it was our house! Finally we sold ours. We approached the owner of ‘our house’ and re-tendered our offer. He accepted it, but could not give us the house until the rental contract ran out in 4 months time. So, still convinced it was ‘our house’, we rented somewhere as well. Normally there is a six month minimum contract, but the Lord provided us with a 4 month minimum contract, and at an unusually low cost.

Despite all this, the doubts set in. The neighbourhood we were due to move into seemed to go downhill with some neglect and dereliction. We renewed our search for a house, but nothing came up. We went back to the pastor. (on a beautifully sunny day when he was dishing out home-grown strawberries and ice cream!). he said that if we had an agreement with the vendor, then a Christians we should honour it.

And so we did.

The neighbourhood had indeed gown downhill. The house had developed damp. Our neighbour’s children threw things at our kids and dropped knives and broken glass onto our patio. Where was God in this?

He was in the nearby Methodist and Elim Pentecostal churches where our children established lifelong friends and established themselves firmly in their own Christian faith.

Lunch break over – I’ll tell you about the next time, next time!!