House-Selling Update

“If you don’t have it now, you don’t need it now.”

I once heard Elizabeth Elliott say this on her radio program, and it struck me so much that I jotted it down immediately. Stuck in a 1400-square-foot townhome with three preschoolers and a work-from-home husband, I longed for a bigger house. These words gave me patience, and in time, the Lord provided what has been a perfect home for us.

Now, with our house on the market and not a buyer in sight for the past 9 or 10 weeks, I’m finding comfort in those words again. Much as we’d like to be living in Wisconsin now, building relationships and throwing our energy into the church plant there, God must not need us there yet. I’m fully confident that He can and will move us exactly when He wants.

We are getting used to the hour-and-twenty-five-minute drive on Sundays. We all have our little routines: Papa Rooster preaches sermons in his head as he drives; the older kids read or sleep; I sip coffee from a travel mug, open mail, or write in a Word document on my laptop--while keeping the two youngest supplied with books and toys. Papa Rooster drives up there one night a week, after work, to meet with the core team, and spends the night since it’s closer to his work than here. So things are still moving forward with the church, despite our geographical location.

On the home front, I have a lot more peace than I had a few weeks ago, since we made the big decision to unpack the PODS. Back in April, when it was delivered to our driveway, I was full of faith that we’d be moved by Christmas for sure. So I packed up everything I figured we could live without for a few months, including all our winter clothes and outerwear.

As time went by and we realized how bad the real estate market is, I became less and less eager to finish packing up the PODS and have them come take it away. My packing had slowed to a standstill, in fact, with over a fourth of the space in the PODS still to go. We sent out an SOS to friends to pray for us, we dropped our price—and still nothing happened with our house.

But what happened with me was that I became peaceful. It seemed obvious, now, that of course we would unpack the PODS to get things we needed; it seemed we were continually adding to our list of items missed. We’d repack with a longer-term vision in mind, or maybe--not at all. (Since we did unpack most of it, a couple weekends ago, into our garage--maybe we'll just unpack the rest and store it there. Easy access and no monthly rental!)

And though we can't completely jettison the moving mindset--since we could still sell our house any day--we’ll just keep doing the next thing: homeschooling, doing musicals, keeping the house clean, cooking meals, writing sermons...

...and driving a long way to church.