Hope, Healing & Heaven

Sam came over to my car and said that he had just gotten a call from our lawyer to notify us that our buyers had backed out of the deal because of the situation with the well. Seriously.

To say that this was upsetting would be an understatement. The bottom had fallen out and Sam was quite understandably upset. We had an agreement to rent the new house for the first month, but after that we would have to buy it and qualify to carry two mortgages. I knew that this was a very bad situation, but tried to hold on to the belief that if God was really sending us here, He would make a way for it to work out.

We arrived in our new neighborhood by late afternoon, in time to get the keys to the house, drop the dogs off there and go out for dinner. We went back to the house and slept on air mattresses in the family room that night.

When the moving van arrived I set up a lawn chair in the driveway and directed the movers to where everything should go. Being the third week of August, I expected it to be hot, but it was REALLY hot. As I was sitting there, I began to notice how many airplanes I was hearing. We were living within a 10-minute drive of the airport, so we could clearly see and hear the arriving and departing flights. The planes did not fly directly over our neighborhood, but that was a small consolation.

Then I noticed how much traffic noise I could hear. Sam and I had always agreed that we would never live where we could hear traffic. We had only seen this house once in a rush on a Sunday when there is reduced traffic, and had just not realized the extent of all the noise from both airplanes and cars.

The heat, the airplanes and the car noise were enough to freak me out, but those were just added on top of the fact that I was still suffering from stabbing pain, still feeling upset over everything we had just gone through, knowing that we no longer had a buyer for our house, feeling the heavy responsibility for believing that I had heard from God that we were supposed to move, and knowing that Sam was upset for all these reasons and more.

The kids were starting school within two days so I had to drive them to both of their new schools to get them registered. I knew that the elementary schools in the county were on a year-round schedule and we had managed to get Jessa into the session that was beginning that week. What we didn’t realize was that this session had actually started earlier in the summer. Each “band” was on a cycle of nine weeks on, three weeks off. So poor Jessa came home from school the first day very upset that she had no idea what was going on in class since she had missed the first nine weeks, a fact that the school had neglected to explain when I pre-registered her by phone before we moved. And unfortunately for Jessa, her teacher was not willing or able to help her out with what she had missed.

The day the kids started school I also dropped Nate off at the airport for his flight home, so I was alone in the house for the first time and feeling extremely upset over everything about the situation. I was imagining that God was somehow punishing us because we hadn’t had the time to really look into the right place to live (which I now find ridiculous but that’s what I was thinking at the time). I just couldn’t understand how things could have gone so wrong if this was where God wanted us to be. I thought that if we were trying to follow God’s instructions, shouldn’t everything just work out? So, in my confusion and disappointment I stood in the middle of the living room, yelled at the top of my lungs and demanded “God, you have to tell me if this is the right place! Send someone to talk to me today!!!” I was desperate.

Half an hour later, the doorbell rang. An across-the-cul-de-sac neighbor whom I had not yet met, Lynn, was there and I invited her in.

We talked about our families and where we were from, and then she started telling me how she and her husband had chosen the property on which they were now living. She said that they had actually done noise and traffic studies and had parked in the cul-de-sac (the one we now shared with them) for six months before deciding that this was exactly the best place to build in this area. As she said that, I suddenly remembered the words I had just yelled at God not even an hour earlier. I blurted out “Oh my gosh, God sent you here today!” She was obviously uncomfortable with that and quickly changed the subject. But I immediately knew I had a very definite answer to the question I had about not being able to do our homework - because Lynn and her husband HAD done the homework! While I don’t usually recommend yelling at God, He clearly didn’t mind answering a sincere distress call for help. As she was leaving, Lynn also invited me to a neighborhood women’s “coffee” that would be held a few weeks later.

God had very graciously responded to my demand for an answer TODAY with a nod from God that answered “You are in exactly the right place.” But even knowing that I had this assurance from God Himself, I was still highly distressed over it.