28.6.03

Following a homeless man

Selling a home is a big task. Nay, a gigantic task! I mean, if you want to do it right, you’ve got to get yourself a good realtor, an appraisal on your house and then start deciding just how much profit you want to reap off of this beautiful abode which you’ve put hours of days of work into. Then come the open-houses… The place you come for sanctuary, to relax, to not worry about what you look like, becomes a high-maintenance department store window for the whole world to see. The carpet must be eternally clean enough to eat off of. The splash guards must be perfectly aligned with the gutter spouts. Piles of underwear upon the floors and nose clippings around the bathroom sink are no longer acceptable living conditions. After all, people are going to be walking through your house… people you don’t even know! This is where anxiety finds it’s breeding ground. Who knows how long this masquerade of Better Homes and Gardens® living could go on?
Then, days later, after only one person looks at your home, it sells. Your house is now sold as if God were beating you over the head with a steel rail engraved with the word “MOVE” all over it! You were hoping you’d be able to sell eventually for somewhere near what you were asking, but never did you imagine this quickly! A month ago you hadn’t even considered moving any time soon… Where are you going to move to now?

This is the scenario of the past few months for my wife and I. Amidst a summer filled with weeklong trips, day trips and VBS, we’ve been boxing up all the stuff we’ve somehow managed to accumulate over three years of marriage. We topped it off by moving out of our lovely home of two years on my birthday! (If you haven’t had the SHEER JOY of moving out of a home on your birthday, I really do suggest you try to arrange it.) We now find ourselves homeless and having a hard time either finding a repo-home that we’re happy with or are being out-bid by others on homes that we really like! It’s been a bit frustrating. Especially when you consider how obvious it seemed that God wanted us to move yet we’ve yet to find a place to move to.

But this is the God we serve. He doesn’t number the dots for us so that we can complete the puzzle on our own. He asks us to surrender and trust Him as our Leader and our Provider. That’s something that I’ve had a really hard time doing through all of this, yet I can see Him. I see my Provider in the countless people who have offered to put us up in their homes. I see my Provider in the fact that we’re not having to make payments on a home while we’re gone on trips this summer. I see my Leader saying “foxes have dens and birds have nests, but I, the Son of Man, have no home of my own, not even a place to lay my head.” It’s time to filter our own desires through the truth of Jesus Christ.

“Your heavenly Father already knows all your needs, and he will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern.” –Matthew 6:32-33