We should hear sometime today about the house on Turtlecreek. This house has been on our radar for almost two months.  We saw it come on the market and jumped immediately. It was big, spacious, in a great neighborhood and cheap!!! It is a foreclosure and we thought maybe, just maybe we could make it work in our budget… We offered over asking and got the house over multiple offers!!! We were ecstatic and already pricing carpet. I wish that was the end of the story but sadly it isn’t.  We had gotten creative with our financing and hadn’t really cleared everything before we made the offer. We ended up having to retract our offer which opened the pool to other buyers. Second time around we didn’t win.

It was hard to move on because we are looking for a long term home. The home our girls will grow up in. We need it to work for us now and down the road when we have teenagers. I felt strongly about having a good amount of square footage, like 2500. I felt strongly about having a sense of community and other kids close by for our girls to play with. There were things about Turtlecreek that most houses in our price range didn’t have… all of that plus a fireplace in the master and a pool/hot tup to name a couple. However, we tried our hardest. We gave Guthrie a fair chance, and even West Edmond. Now we love Guthrie and if the right house popped up we would jump.  West Edmond is a little different… Stephen would have a lot of traffic to and from work and it just felt like a head ache I didn’t want for the next 10+ years.

This house shopping process has been difficult for me.  We started looking in October when we found out we would be moving.  We initially found a great home in Southeast Edmond; great yard, cul de sac, lots of space, and dated=cheap. We put an offer in and negotiated a little only to find out they had decided to go with a lower cash offer.  I was crushed and nothing compared. We kept looking but with a move, Christmas, two birthdays, and a miscarriage in December/ early January we slowed down.

Thats when Turtlecreek hit. After we lost it I dove hard into a house in Guthrie. Talk about magical and a sweet place to raise three girls. It was unfinished and for an Interior Designer it was a dream. I made plans and met our contractor/friend at the house to get a quote. What we though would be around 70K was over 150K. We knew that the current owners had bought it for 30K but didn’t know what their all in was… It was $163,000.  So yeah… for 313k we could be in our dream home… Too bad we were $100,000 short.

I threw my hands up and finally gave it to God. I knew he already had the house for us. I knew he wanted to provide for us, but in the moment if something had worked out I would have taken all the credit for it. I look for houses unlike anyone I know. Obsessed is an understatement. No one has shown me a house I hadn’t already seen, analyzed, walked around the neighborhood via the street view, looked at schools and read the parent reviews, put it into the mortgage calculator and even drawn the floor plan out to see if my furniture would fit and that we could make it all we ever wanted a house to be.  I AM CRAZY!!!

But on this day I stopped. I stopped freaking out. I rested in the promise that my heavenly Father wants to provide for me and is just waiting for the right time to reveal the home he has had for me all along. I rested in the fact that I am not big enough or stupid enough to mess up his perfect plan. My heart wanted what he wanted, if he wanted to plop it in my lap with not a ounce of work on my side he would. I still looked but I didn’t obsess. I calmed down. I breathed, and I soaked in a peace that was always available but that I had yet to take advantage of.

See his love is like a cloud, we are constantly living in this cloud. But we slowly get wrapped up in the misconception that we control our lives, kinda like putting on a gas mask. I don’t need you God, I can do it myself. He rolls his eyes cuz he knows his cloud is all we need but we refuse it. He never takes his cloud away, it follows us everywhere we go. It never leaves or forsakes us. We just aren’t choosing to see it or take it in. On that day I removed my mask and took a deep breath. “Guide me, provide for me, you are my home, you are everything I need.”

So back to today. If they tell us we got the house, it will be GOD. A miracle. There are multiple offers and we didn’t even get close to the asking price. If we don’t get it, I know it wasn’t the house for us and God is waiting with a better home. A home that will house our love, our laughter, our ministry even better than Turtlecreek ever could.

I’ll keep you posted.