Trying to understand God is impossible. The best we can do is believe what he tells us about himself.

He tells us that despite our faults, mistakes and sins, he loves us passionately and is looking out for our best interests. We nod enthusiastically about the love part, but looking out for us? When nothing we plan goes right, we doubt that.

After nearly four years of trying to sell our house and truly needing to, we finally got an offer that looked promising. As the realtor was describing the buyers, she said, “It’s a bride and groom who want to move in before their wedding, two months from now.”

After 29 years in one house, we’d be moving in just a few weeks!  I was newly energized and began collecting empty boxes for packing. My journal from that time was filled with exclamation points, happy faces and praises to the Lord. But it wasn’t too long before clouds began to form on our real estate horizon.

The bride and groom had both been married before and each had a house to sell before they could buy ours. They had four high school kids between them, who all needed to start school soon.

Our realtor suggested we drop our price by another $50,000 so they could drop their home prices and raise their odds of selling. Miraculously, within two weeks, we got word the groom’s house had sold, one-half of the miracle we needed. God was moving in power!

Meanwhile, national real estate was twisting and turning in a stiff recessional wind, and home prices were in free-fall. We thanked God for our buyers and prayed they wouldn’t get cold feet.

But they moved forward with determination, revisiting our house twice to measure rooms and a third time to bring an inspector. Even though this nit-picking guy combed through our home (with them in tow) for 7 hours and found all kinds of little things wrong with our 100-year old house, the buyers left that day saying, “Can’t wait to move in!”

But when their wedding date arrived, the bride’s house still hadn’t sold. Both of them expressed nervousness, but we all signed a contract extension. While they were on their honeymoon, school started, and all four teens were enrolled at the high school local to the bride’s home rather than the school in our district.

Just then Nate and I got an ingenious idea, which we took to be directly from God. Since we were wanting to downsize locally, we offered to swap houses with the bride if they would add an equalizing down payment for our bigger home. We were confident they’d love the plan.

When they returned, we presented our proposal but were shocked to learn they’d made a complete turnaround and wanted to unwind the deal. They said, “Our kids have settled in at their new school, and we’re worried about the economy.” Two days later the extension expired, and the deal died.

We’d been sure our buyers were from God, but once again, he was beyond figuring out.

That night Nate dug out the homeowner’s insurance policy and noted that if we torched the place, we’d get twice the asking price.

(…to be continued)

“God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways. He does great things beyond our understanding.” (Job 37:5)