OUR HOUSE IS SOLD!

I realized today, as we set up a new computer for me, that I haven’t yet shared with you what has happened with our house, other than to mention in the last blog that it sold.

In the blog entitled, Our Crooked House, I explained that the reason I was sharing about the issues we had with the house was so that, when the Lord answered my specific prayers, you would be able to rejoice with me.  Well, get ready to rejoice!

We listed the house for sale on July 6 and had an open house for local realtors the next day, followed by an open house for buyers that weekend. The realtors’ open house was not encouraging.  Although we had a disclosure form revealing the settling, plus an engineer’s report saying that the foundation was solid, they were not optimistic that their clients would be interested. This was at least part of the reason why we had very little traffic at our first open house and few interested parties as the week went on. 

Since that was also just the week after the 4^th of July and a popular week for vacations, Jim and I didn’t get too concerned.  We thought it would pick up after a while.  It didn’t.  After about 3 weeks we came down in price, offered the house “as is”, and began to advertise to appeal to builders.  

If you read, Our Crooked House, then you will know how I had been praying since before we put the house on the market.  Expecting that it would be hard to sell the house I began praying specifically that we would sell it to a builder who would tear it down and build something new so that some other family might enjoy this town and neighborhood as much as we did, and not have a hard time selling it themselves later on down the line.

Early in August a potential buyer made a very low offer.  By that time Jim and I  suspected that we would have to come down substantially.  We determined that at our age, getting to Florida sooner rather than later mattered to us much more than the money, so Jim and I sat down and made a list of how much it would cost us to build a modest house in Florida and cover the expenses of the move, and determined a price we could live with.  After a little back and forth negotiating, we settled on a price, and sold our crooked house.

Want to know who bought it?  A builder.  He’s not going to tear it down to its foundation, but he is going to gut it, fix the issue that caused the house to settle in the first place, and make our 3 bedroom home a 4 bedroom home with 3 baths and a great room!  The people who buy it will get to enjoy our neighborhood AND, best of all, not have a single worry about settling when it comes time to sell it!  And Jim and I finally get to surge ahead with our move to Florida.  

As of today, we are almost ready to go.  Nearly all of our belongings are packed, furniture is given away, arrangements made for shipping the rest, and we are just counting the days till the September 10^th closing!  This week we put a deposit on a home in Florida so they can start building.

I’m so grateful to the Lord for undertaking for us in this house sale thing, answering my very specific prayers.  The process was distressing and disappointing at times - but not for long.  Through it all, the Lord taught us to just go with the flow, to access what we really NEEDED instead of what we wanted, and helped us to choose to value time over money.  

We are very excited about the adventure that lies ahead and can’t wait to see what the Lord has in store as we move to our new house, in a new town, in a new state.  God is faithful, as ever. 

TURN OFF THAT COMPUTER!!

This week I began reading 2 Peter, chapter 1.  When I got to verses 5-8 where Peter said:

“For this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.  For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

As I said in my previous blog, having endured a long period of spiritual barrenness and dryness, Peter’s words caught my attention.  I began to wonder, how diligent AM I to add these things to my faith?

I looked up the word diligence and found it had a number of synonyms: careful; persistent; effort; conscientiousness; application.

I began to think more about diligence in broader terms.

Careful to me has the meaning of not leaving it to chance.  The Holy Spirit is in the business of sanctification – the process of making me more like Jesus in all of the ways Peter speaks of, but I also have a part in that, that of cooperating with the Spirit, of obedience, of sensitivity to His voice as I stay close to Jesus. 

The Apostle Paul speaks of this cooperation between believers and the Holy Spirit in Philippians 2:12-13 when he says:

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”

Persistent.  Keep at it.  A failure one day shouldn’t lead to giving up.  Sanctification is a life-long process.

Effort.  To grow beyond saving faith to know the Lord better, I MUST be a student of His Word.  Being a student takes effort!  Effort beyond just attending Sunday services.  I need to go beyond the basics, study, ask questions, dig deeper. I need to learn to feed myself not just expect others to do so.

Conscientiousness implies not just persistence for its own sake, but meticulous, keep at it, study – searching God’s Word, getting to know Jesus through it.

Application takes study one step further.  It implies applying what I’m learning to my life, learning to live out the principles of God’s Word, looking more like Jesus.

I asked myself the question, “So what ARE you absolutely diligent about?”  Here’s my sad and shameful list:

• Brushing and flossing my teeth.  I never miss a day of this.
• Checking email, Facebook and other computer sites.  I’m especially diligent about this.
• Putting make-up on before I go out.  I would NEVER go out without doing this!
• Attending church every Sunday.  I’m glad I could put THAT one on there!
• Being uber responsible about ministry involvement.  But not always for the right reasons.

That led me to the next question: “Am I giving the same degree of diligence to getting to know Jesus better, adding to Peter’s list of qualities to my faith?

Sadly, my answer was “No!”.  

• If I go to the gym or meet a friend for breakfast, I’m more likely to forego my quiet time. 
• In an effort to combine using the computer with devotion, I go through the motions of seeking the Lord but never really connect.
• A million and one things create a perfect storm of whatever the opposite of “diligence” is – neglect, laziness, mediocrity, carelessness, maybe. 

Which leads me to another question with an obvious answer (see previous blog):

How do I reorder my current priorities so that I give knowledge of the Lord and greater intimacy, the diligence it – and He – deserves? 

The first thing I need to do is so simple it's ridiculous.  Don’t even turn on my computer until I’ve diligently sought the Lord in relationship.  Surely if I can be diligent to brush my teeth and put on makeup, I can do THIS! 

DEVOTIONS, WHY SUCH A CHALLENGE?

We have about 3 weeks left before we close on our house.  Much of our packing is finished, except for the things we’re still using.  Not a lot to do at the moment, so I wasn’t at all happy when early last week my computer decided to die.  We quickly ordered a new one, but it’s arrival date is still a long week away.

Then last weekend we went to visit my brother and sister in law for the weekend.  I woke Saturday morning to find them outside on their porch.  My brother was going over his sermon for Sunday and my sister in law had her Bible open, having her morning quiet time.  I had my Bible with me, as always, but primarily so I could take it to worship on Sunday.  A Holy Spirit inspired thought struck me, how did I get out of the habit of making reading my Bible an every morning priority? 

I don’t know about the rest of you, but reading and studying God’s Word consistently has always been a joy, but also a bit of a battle for me, especially in the last few years.  When I saw Jan with her Bible that morning, I remembered back to a time many years ago when we were vacationing at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.  It happened that a friend of our youngest daughter, Becky, was also staying at the same place, with her mom.  Her friend saw me reading my Bible early one morning and said to Becky, “Does your mom always bring her Bible with her wherever she goes?”.  Becky said, “Yes”, because it was true.  I still do bring my Bible with me wherever I go, but the practice of studying it has become inconsistent and dry.

The more recent lack of consistency started me thinking, “What has changed?”  The untimely death of my computer drove the reason home – computers have entered my life – and they are the boon and bane of my existence!  These marvels of technology have vastly improved my ability to write – journals, blogs, even letters.  They have made teaching preparation so much easier, saving me time and making editing a snap!  But the down side is that I am addicted.  I turn it on first thing and then throughout the course of the day, I’m continually checking things – email, Facebook, my blog views, the missionary agency through which I correspond with people all over the world (this is the thing of greatest value). 

In the past few months I have tried reading through books of the Bible I hadn’t read in a while, jotting notes in a word document and then writing my prayers.  It hasn’t been helpful at all.  I’m busy, typing away, but my mind isn’t truly engaging with God’s Word and God Himself seems distant.

Without my computer these last two weeks, with nothing else to distract me, I have resumed the practice I had back in the day when we were on that Rehoboth Beach vacation.  I have begun reading a book of the Bible and writing down my thoughts – asking questions, looking up answers, writing principles, making applications to my life. This experience of intimacy with God as He speaks to me through His Word is what my heart has longed for in the many months of spiritual dryness I’ve been experiencing.  I realize now that I can’t rely on my computer for my quiet times.  It is a task that doesn’t foster intimacy with the Lord Himself. 

Here’s a head’s up for you, when I’m not writing blogs about something the Lord is doing or has said to me as I study, then I’m not experiencing deep, meaningful quiet times with Him.  Feel free to call me on it! 

Watch out for the next blog because I’ll share with you something I thought about this week in God’s Word!

OUR CROOKED HOUSE

Okay, so I have decided to bare all and share with you what’s going on with our house.  Thirty one years ago, in order to be closer to the church we loved and the Christian school where we hoped to send our girls, we began looking for a house.  It was not a great time to buy a house.  Interest rates were high and it was NOT a buyer’s market.  There were not a huge number of houses to look at in our price range.  Most were tiny too, so when our realtor said, “There’s one more, but I hesitate to show it to you because it has some settling problems”, we took a look anyway.  

In partnership with my parents, we had just sold our house in the historic seaside town of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, just two blocks from the ocean.  We bought the house five years previously from a very elderly couple who were selling it for an extremely low price.  I can’t remember whether we had a house inspection, but my guess is that we didn’t.  Not everyone did back in that day. So it was, that we had no idea until later that the house, built on the sandy soil of Ocean Grove, had settled. 

How did we find out? Well, not through a disclosure form which is required today.  No, we found out about the settling when we discovered that the legs on the headboard side of one of the beds had been cut shorter so the bed would be level!  We laughed at the solution that old couple had come up with to keep from sliding off the bottom of the bed in the middle of the night.  In Ocean Grove, settling in a house built on sand was apparently no big deal!

So it was that when the realtor back here later mentioned that the house we were going to see had settled, I was not discouraged at all.  The Ocean Grove house had settled, yet it had stood the test of time (and it stands still these 30 years later!).  The truth of her statement was obvious when we looked at the bedrooms.  There were no beds with legs cut shorter, but it was obvious the bedroom floors were listing toward the center of the house.  However they were certainly no worse than the house in Ocean Grove! 

Once I cast aside the concern about settling, the house was appealing.  I didn’t think I wanted a split level house until I saw one.  It had so much more room than the others we had looked at that my mind began to change.  And it was within our price range.  The detail that swung the deal for us was that it had an assumable, 3 % mortgage rate, at a time when the mortgage rate was at least twice that!  We had been praying for the Lord’s direction and to us this seemed like a providential  affirmation.  So we made an offer, and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is the house in which we have spent the last 31 years of our married lives.  In it we raised and launched two daughters, both now in their mid-30s and living on their own in other states.  And in it we raised our granddaughter for two thirds of her 18 years.  We have great memories of parties and graduations and holidays and grandparent visits and Bible studies and international student guests over the years.  But now this house is way too big and costing us too much, physically and financially, to maintain.  It has become time for us to downsize.  So we decided to put the house on the market.

Of all my family members, I seemed to dread the experience the most, because this wasn’t the first time we’ve tried to sell this house.  Back in the early 1990s, Jim’s company relocated its headquarters from Manhattan to Connecticut and offered their employees a relocation package that included the purchase of their homes.  We were excited about a possible move, so I contacted a realtor and began looking at houses in Connecticut, while also working with a realtor here to put our house on the market. 

The day of the realtors’ open house, and the days following, are ones I never forgot.  The company gave us the dire news – they didn’t want to buy the house because of the settling.  I remember my emotions – shock, discouragement, disbelief, embarrassment, anger.  In the end, we decided not to move.  The result was that Jim commuted for three hours back and forth to Connecticut every day until he retired three years ago. 

I vividly remembered the devastation of those days, so that this time around I anticipated more of the same, and I was not disappointed.  The reaction of our realtor and the other realtors who came to the most recent realtors’ open house was not encouraging.  The feeling was that few people would be interested in buying the house, even in a seller’s market with good interest rates. 

After our experience 15 years ago of trying to sell we hired a structural engineer whose report said the house had probably settled within the first year or so of being built (in 1955) and as far as he was concerned, had probably not settled any further since.  But because the report had been done 15 years ago, not a lot of stock is being given to it by potential buyers now.  So, after a month of being on the market, with not a lot of interest in our house, we spoke to our realtor about reducing the price substantially, to cover the land only, with the house thrown in, AS IS.  That was a week ago, and since then we’ve had more activity than we ever had when we were selling the house.

Maybe you wondering: After you had trouble selling the house the first time, why didn’t you investigate how to fix it and then do it? 

Jim and I talked about that tonight at dinner.  First of all we didn’t notice it all that much.  We had the bedrooms carpeted years ago using a process called flash patching where they adjust the carpet padding to minimize the uneven floor.  We didn’t even remember that until our son in law removed the bedroom carpeting and refinished the hard wood floors and the settling issue became more obvious.

Second, in the years since the early 90s, life intruded.  We were busy raising our family and working and it wasn’t a priority.  And then, as I said before, after our Ocean Grove experience, we really didn’t expect it would be an issue.  

We do have some things going for us. The best one, from a human perspective, is is that we live in a town very desirable because of its award winning school system.  But that’s not all we have going for us. We have prayer and a God who answers it.

Long before we put the house on the market, I began praying specifically about the sale as a result of a conversation I had with a lovely older lady from our church.  Years ago she and her husband had been thinking of doing exactly what we want to do – sell the home that had become too big and downsize.  They had a lovely split level home of which her husband took great pride and excellent care, in a town nearby.  Because the house was so well looked after, it took them by complete surprise when, before they had even listed the house, a builder approached them offering to give them full market value for the house, after which he would tear it down and build another, more modern home.  It was hard for her husband to agree to, but eventually they said yes, and sold it to the builder without ever even having to list it with a realtor.  Wow!

That’s exactly what I have been praying and hoping the Lord will do for us. I have been asking the Lord to send us a builder to buy the house, tear it down, and erect another – with a stable foundation and level floors – so that some other family can enjoy this property in all the ways we have enjoyed it, and at the same time be saved from having to market the same flawed house at some point in their future!

So why share all this?  It is definitely a first world problem.  Compared to the REAL problems of survival in much of the world, this isn’t all that big a deal.  But it is a big deal for us, an emotional and a financial one as well.  When the rejection of our house happened AGAIN, my primary emotions were embarrassment and shame over buying the house in the first place.  When people come into your home and overlook what might be nice about the house, and only fix their eyes on the flaws, it’s humiliating.  It feels like they’re criticizing your housekeeping, and maybe even your intelligence. And the thought of not being able to sell your house feels despairing.  So, for the last month, I’ve only shared this with a few people. 

But I decided to share it today with all of you for one reason and one reason only, and here it is:  One day soon the Lord is going to answer my prayers for the sale of this house – abundantly beyond all that I can ask or even imagine – and we will be able to sell it, hopefully as I have been praying, to a builder who will make the next one RIGHT. 

In the meantime, it’s a waiting game, one we hope will have a happy ending – for two families.

   

IS IT REALLY 45 YEARS???

It was my last year of college.  I had been casually dating this guy who was going to take me to my college prom.  He had also promised he’d find one of his friends to take one of mine.  However, just a short time before the event, we broke up.  It wasn’t a big deal for me, I could always just skip the prom, but my friend was counting on going and now she didn’t have a date either.  I felt awful.  So I began making phone calls to all the guys I knew asking if they could take my friend to the prom.  No takers.  It was then that my mom mentioned that she worked with a woman who had four sons.  So it was that I met Jim, my first and only blind date, when he and his younger brother Marty agreed to take my friend and me to the prom.

When they arrived to pick us up, I nearly died!  I thought Jim was the BEST looking guy I had ever seen!  He was also just finishing college at St. Peter’s in Jersey City.  Wow, how perfect!  I don’t remember a lot about that night except that Jim was quiet and I hoped he would call again. And he did!  So began our courtship.  By the fall of that year, I had started teaching in Secaucus and Jim had begun a two year stint with the Army, having been in ROTC in college.  So almost right out of the gate our romance had to be carried on long distance, as he was stationed first in Petersburg, Virginia and then at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina. 

Counting on absence making his heart grow fonder, I began “encouraging” him (read “nagging”) to think about getting married.  Before a year was up, we had become engaged, but Jim knew he had to serve a tour in Viet Nam before his service time was over and he was reluctant to marry beforehand.  A little more “encouragement” later, and we were making plans to marry before he left.  I think it’s funny how long people today plan so far in advance to get married because we had just 4 months to plan our wedding and needless to say, for us, it was memorable, although maybe not as elegant as some I’ve been to since.  And we were so much in love.

The morning after the wedding we drove back to his base in North Carolina and with the WORST possible timing, his orders for Viet Nam were waiting when he signed in.  I remember pulling up outside the apartment he had rented and having everyone around the pool stand and clap when they saw the, “Just Married” signs on our car.  We must have seemed so rude in our lack of response, but our spirits were at rock bottom. We would have about three months together before he would be sent to Viet Nam for what was initially to be a 12 month tour.

Many difficult months followed his departure as I was married, but with no husband in sight. Back then, before e mail and skype, all we had to rely on communication wise was letters and phone calls. The first two weeks were torture because I didn’t know where he was until his first letter arrived.  Letters seemed to take forever!  At times I would be awakened in the middle of the night to accept a MARS call, calls Jim made from Saigon, picked up by ham radio operators here in the states and then relayed to me.  They lasted all of 3 minutes and each time we had finished speaking we had to say “over”, plus the operators were always listening!  But those calls were precious, even at 3 AM!  There were also regular phone calls Jim made after standing in line forever on a day when he was off duty.  These were as long as you wanted to make them – before being threatened maybe by the next guy in line!  And those hour long calls cost a fortune!  What was so emotionally charged in THAT day is a sweet memory to me now.

With a two week surprise home leave in April, a 5 day R & R (rest & relaxation) in Honolulu for our first anniversary, and a two month cut of his service time, Jim was finally, permanently home in September of 1971.  We were so happy to be together again and final start our married life  – me in my second year of teaching, and him as an accountant with what was then Haskins & Sells, and is now Deloitte. 

What followed has been 45 years of ups and downs.  Job changes, home changes, children to raise, adult children to relate to, a granddaughter, retirement – and some tough years that were a huge strain on our marriage and family life.  I’m also surprised at how many young people who marry today give up so easily.  It wasn’t easy to stay committed to the “better or worse”, “sickness and health” aspects of our marriage vows, and at least once we may have wondered if we wanted to stick it out.  But we did, and I know we’re both thankful for the grace of God that enabled us. It's not easy to weather those times, but it is possible.

We were not believers in Jesus when we met and married, so I have to thank God for bringing us together before we even knew Him.  I married Jim because he was a nice guy, and incredibly good looking, and I was crazy about him, but if I met him today I’d marry him because he is a man of God, amazingly steadfast and faithful, and because we are the best of friends. 

Today is our 45^th wedding anniversary, and we are still in love, thanks to the grace of God.

HOME

Lying in bed last night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I was thinking about the blog my daughter Becky wrote.  Illustrated with photographs, she wrote about all the things in our house and yard that held fond memories for her.  She has already relocated to Florida with her family, while we remain behind to sell our home of 31 years, in the hope of relocating there ourselves, so she’s had a bit more time to contemplate the leaving side of things.

But now the work is done for us and we have put out the “for sale” sign.  We are selling a house, but this house has been so much more than a dwelling to us, this has been our home. 

We moved here when our girls were just turning four and six.  This is where they grew up.  In our yard they swung on the tire swing their grandpa had tied to a long tree branch.  They climbed our trees and, much to the dismay of our neighbors, our lilac bushes.  They cooled off in the plastic kiddie pool, played “tour guide” in the yard, explored what used to be a vacant woodland behind the house.  

At one time or another they spent time in just about every school playground in town.  They swam in the local swimming hole every summer day.  They made weekly trips to the library and participated in the summer reading program every year.  On our quiet cul-de-sac they’ve ridden bikes, played ball and badminton, thrown water balloons, had lemonade stands. 

On the 4^th of July we brought our breakfast to the swimming lake in town and ate while we watched the parade go by.  At Halloween, the girls went trick or treating and enjoyed especially nice treats from the neighbors.  At Christmas we caroled, and made loaves of bread to give as gifts.  We celebrated birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays – even April Fool’s Day!  We held open houses and invited all the neighbors. 

Our neighborhood has been a great one in which to live.  Some of our neighbors have lived here longer than we have and they have provided stability and a neighborliness it’s not so easy to find these days.  We have shared house keys, collected mail, fed and walked pets, helped plow snow, dig out a snowed in car, clean up after hurricanes, and generally kept an eye on things for one another.  Whenever Jim went outside on a short errand and disappeared for AGES, I knew I would find him in conversation with the guy next door.  

Since we have lived here we have been affiliated with three different churches.  Each one has been a blessing in its own right.  We have sat under awesome Bible teaching, given our children a good spiritual foundation, participated in Vacation Bible Schools, and Sunday school, and served the Lord in various capacities.  And we made many friends, brothers and sisters in Christ we run into all over the place from those three congregations.  What a blessing, and a little taste of heaven!

We have enjoyed wonderful memories here, and some not so wonderful memories as well, but they all contributed to making us the people, and the family that we are today.  This has been home, and it has been a good one at that. 

I am thankful for each and every one of these 31 years.

WHAT TO DO WHILE I WAIT

Jim was working the sound equipment at church this morning so we had to be there early.  When this happens and I’m not teaching Sunday school, I usually drop him off and then head to Panera for some coffee till it’s time for church.  I did that today, and when I did, I brought along my copy of, “Experiencing God”, by Henry T. Blakaby and Claude V. King, an oldie but a goodie.  More about that in a minute!

I can’t remember what it’s like not to serve the Lord through my church.  Since we have lived in this area we have been members of three different churches and in each one we were involved in some kind of ministry.  Jim has served as a deacon and as a financial officer, as he does now as treasurer of our current church.  I have always been involved either in teaching women, or teaching children, sometimes both at the same time.  And it has been glorious to serve the Lord in whatever capacity He has in mind.  So, one of the things I’m finding hard about waiting for the move to Florida is that it’s kind of a down time for me in terms of ministry and looks to be so for many months yet.

Now that is NOT a bad thing!  Summers, when teaching ministries are taking a break, I usually use the time to begin studying some book of the Bible just for the pure pleasure of study.  I love doing this because I just love seeing God in all His glory through His Word, but I also love doing it because the Lord has so often used what I studied personally to give me material for a teaching assignment that isn’t even on MY radar yet – although it’s certainly on His!  This summer, however, all this moving business has proved to be a huge distraction! 

I spend some quiet time with the Lord nearly every day, but my mind keeps wandering off to my long “to do” list (as it does in the middle of the night when I should be sleeping!).  When I’m not thinking about doing, I’m actually doing, and when I’m not actually doing, I’m exhausted from all the doing I’ve already done!  So it was a delight to sit in Panera’s with my coffee and a berry scone and just lose myself in “Experiencing God”.  I was rewarded with some reminders I really need to hear.

In this time of waiting on the Lord:

·       My focus needs to be on HIM – not on my “to do” list, the sale of a house, our future, the lack of ministry.

·       My focus needs to be on God’s greater purpose for this time of waiting 

·       Instead of asking, “When will this be over so we can move?”, I need to be asking, “How can I cooperate with You, Lord, to accomplish Your much bigger purposes”, while we wait and it’s a ministry down time.  God is still at work around me and He wants me to join Him in that work.  If my focus is on Him, He’ll be able to point it out.

·       I want things to move along quickly.  I want them to go smoothly.  I’m ashamed to say that it has never occurred to me that the Lord may have a purpose for me in these up and down days of waiting, beyond just, waiting.

Henry Blackaby reminded me that during this time I CAN still be active in the work of God.  It isn’t all about ME, MY SELF, MY HOUSE, MY FUTURE – it IS about God, and the work He’s still doing HERE that He just might want me to be part of.

Instead of worrying and fretting, or being distracted by the details, I can adjust my attitude and my life in anticipation of what He still up to around me, while we still live right here, in this house, on this block, in this town, in my church. . . . .

If all I do is focus on a house, a move, a future, I just might miss what the Lord wants to do right here, right now.  The Lord has all of that in hand.  My job at the moment?  Keep my eyes on Him and watch for His opportunities to join Him in His work.