Reminding myself...

This is a Facebook note I wrote in January, 2009:
This Was God's Idea
Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 10:43am

I have to remind myself of that.

It's just the sort of thing He would do...put us in a house with a staggering, budget stretching mortgage and then tell us to fix it up.

When we bought the house back in 2005, the home inspector gave us a green light on it; in fact, he seemed impressed with it. There were only a few things that he recommended the seller fix for us.

We since have learned that its beauty is only skin deep. And the fixes, when they happened, either didn't fix the problem or were done improperly and created new problems. Everything...and I mean everything...in this house appears to have been done as cheaply as possible to look good. It was all about appearances.

It looks pretty good from the curb; it's in a nice neighborhood. This house shouldn't be like this.

But God was obviously in charge of us getting into this house. Never once did I pray asking Him to make it work. My prayer was that, if we were not *supposed* to be here, the deal would fall through somehow. I didn't want to live in a house that wasn't in His plan. Especially one that came with such a big debt load.

But, unlike all the others we were interested in before this one, it didn't fall through, even though there were opportunities for it to fall through. So I have to conclude that God put us here. I considered the mortgage to be the giant in the promised land and reminded myself of that over and over when the worries hit me late at night.

Now there are repairs needed that cannot be postponed. And that budget-breaking mortgage does not leave us resources for them. So, I confess, I was rather put out with My Heavenly Father. It didn't make sense.

And do you know what He did? He pointed me to Hosea and reminded me that it didn't make sense for a man of God to marry a prostitute, either.

Could it be possible that there is some sort of illustration here?

The people we purchased the house from were not Christians; they practiced a pagan religion. Somehow, I began to see the message how pagan philosophy is all about appearances...nothing good and solid on which to build something. Our task is to restore structural integrity to a house that has only a nice appearance. Yes, a powerful illustration.

Also an expensive one. But if this is what God wants us to do, He's got the resources for it. My prayer now is that we'll be strategic in finding and using those resources.

It was, after all, His idea.

We just had a contractor in yesterday to look at FURTHER repairs needed from, basically, the same issue...cheap materials and construction processes. And, once again, we've found that the repairs should've been made LONG ago, and, since they weren't, there is much more extensive work required to a)fix the bad stuff and b) stop further problems.

So I searched back through my FB notes to find that post and remind myself what we're doing and why. This is His idea. His illustration.

And, oh, we have a Wedding happening in less than 8 weeks. Hopefully Phase 1...the essential structural repairs...will be done by then.

I am not going to panic. I am choosing to Trust.

My part, at the moment, is to clear all my sewing stuff from the area by the end of the week. And find SOMEWHERE to put it...