Category Archives: Financial Struggles

Home Improvement – Part V

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Most of us have heard this Christian counsel: “You can be honest with God. He’s tough enough to take it.”

When yet another house deal fell through for Nate and I, we began to play the blame game. Nate blamed the realtor, and I blamed God.

Today I read back through my prayer journal from those days and saw honesty being poured out to God: “I’m thinking, Lord, that you let us get close to succeeding and then deliberately take a sale away. I feel like we can’t win against you. I feel hopeless. Beaten down. What are we doing wrong? How am I praying wrong?”

It didn’t take long for God to answer those questions. The next day, as I read the devotional from “My Utmost for His Highest,” there it was: “God is never impressed by our earnestness. Prayer is not simply getting things from God. It’s getting into perfect communion with God. [As you pray] have no other motive than to know your Father in heaven.”

I’d been begging God to bring a buyer and get the house sold. I’d even prayed for the family that would move into our home, asking God to bless them as they decided our house was the one for them. But praying with the intent to know the Father better? Wasn’t that off-topic?

Our panic to get the house sold had overridden everything else. “Sell the house, Lord. Sell it now! You just have to sell it! What’s holding you back? Hurry up!”

Since I couldn’t see any good reason why he wouldn’t bring a buyer, I viewed him as deliberately spoiling everything by actually preventing the sale. Beneath that line of thinking, however, was my sinful attitude that I understood the situation just as well as God did and was wanting to overrule his opinion. I was forgetting that he was omniscient, and I was shortsighted.

God’s reason for not selling the house might even be something that would eventually thrill me. But swallowing that was difficult. If I could believe it, though, then God’s silence and our long wait would become bearable.

Gradually the mind-set of my prayer journal began to turn. “I don’t understand why you do or don’t do things, but I guess everything’s under your control, God. It’s all up to you. I have no power to shape circumstances, and I want this truth about your sovereignty to soak into me like water into a dry sponge, until I can think like that without even trying.”

Nothing changed about the house. It still wouldn’t sell. But other things did change. Nate’s back began to bother him badly. He started working less and coming home earlier, exhausted from the pain. The economy continued to collapse, and his clients began telling him they were tight financially and couldn’t pay what they owed.

Feeling battered and bruised as we approached the holidays of 2008, we decided to take the house off the market for a while.

No one buys houses at Christmas time.

(…to be continued)

“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33)

Home Improvement – Part IV

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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)

Home Improvement – Part III

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After we finished painting all the rooms in our house, we’d done everything possible to make it sell. Potential buyers came and went, each one raving about how “charming” our home was and how much “character” it had, but no one made an offer. As Linnea said, “If that house ever sells, you’ll know for sure it’s God who does it.”

I thought about our perseverance. It was fruitless. Why was it so important to God anyway? The answer, of course, was that perseverance is one of his character traits, and he’s a champion at it. We’re to emulate him, and cultivating perseverance is part of that calling.

In the Old Testament, Abraham’s offspring, the children of Israel, were about as difficult to deal with as any rebellious child of our time. Yet God modeled perseverance to the nth degree, continuing to love them without conditions. He loves us that way, too.

God also demonstrates perseverance in his efforts to teach us, despite our inability to learn everything he wants us to know. But he uses a variety of methods and sets up life circumstances as object lessons to make our learning easier.

And most impressive is how he persevered to find a way to bridge the chasm between our sin and his sinlessness, letting Jesus go to the cross to absorb our judgment. His perseverance in finding a way for us to be forgiveness is the one and only reason we have access to heaven. If he’d have thrown in the towel and said, “I’m giving up on them,” we’d all be damned.

When I thought of God’s flawless perseverance, my complaints about the house not selling “after all we’d done” seemed trite. God wasn’t doing what I wanted him to, and I was annoyed. But of course there was a good reason for his resistance. I just didn’t know what it was.

When we’d originally put the house on the market, Birgitta was about to enter high school. By this time she was a senior, closing in on graduation, and my patience was wearing thin. We knew seven people who’d put their homes on the market after we had, and during those four years, all seven had sold. We thought maybe we should take down the “For Sale” sign and put up “House for Free.”

As the weeks went by, every time the realtor called to say a new family was coming to look at the house, I’d jump into action: stop what I was doing, wipe the sinks, close the toilet lids, shake the rugs, straighten the throw pillows, turn all the lights on and put Jack in the car. This was done without hope for a sale but strictly because I didn’t want the realtor to know I’d given up.

And then one day it happened. She called and spoke the magic words: “We have an offer!”

We’d heard these words twice before without finalizing a sale. But if we were ever going to sell, it would have to begin there. Did we dare to hope?

(…to be continued)

“What strength do I have, that I should still hope? What prospects, that I should be patient?” (Job 6:11)