The Home We Weren’t Hunting For

One year ago today we closed on our current home. I told myself I was going to blog about our journey into this home, and well here we are a year later already and I haven’t shared the story with you yet. All good things to those who wait right?! Haha. I have shared our testimony and story with some friends, and our family, but I still feel the need to share openly with the rest of my readers and audience what God did in our life last year (and is still doing today).

Last year around February/March, John and I started discussing the possibility of moving to another city. We live in La Vernia, TX and he does most of his work in Boerne, TX. The drive for him is about an hour – hour and a half one way. He is a contractor, and spends a lot of time on the road as it is, checking on jobs, but one job opportunity in particular presented itself and if the job went through we would need to be living right there in town where he would be working. We prayed so hard about this decision. My heart was in La Vernia. We owned 50 acres, our dream property, and “forever home”. Our church family. Fit4Mom family. Our ACTUAL whole family that all lives out here. This is home. I couldn’t imagine leaving.
Through a series of events related to the possibility of moving to Boerne for this job, we gave up all of it. We sold our land and everything we had for it. We had to rehome our horses. It was a test of our faith, and probably one of the hardest things we had to do. My heart hurt, and I longed for the “forever” I had pictured in my head.

Still even in the hard parts, God was working out the details beautifully. Everything sold SO quickly. The horses went to AMAZING homes. We could see God opening the doors and leading us to our new path straight towards Boerne.. Or so we thought.

During the summer months we started actively searching for homes in Boerne. If we were going to make this move I wanted to move during the summer so that the kids didn’t have to try to start a new school mid year. House hunt after house hunt, we just were not finding anything in our budget that would work for us. I was getting frustrated. I felt the questioning rising up in me. “God if this was your plan for us, why are we not finding a house. Why hasn’t the job gone through for John yet. Why did we give up EVERYTHING to just have to sit here and wait. It’s July now, God, I need to register my kids for school , why haven’t we found a house yet.” In tears one night, I had a point that I just told John I couldn’t do it anymore. I was frustrated with the unknown, and the planner in me couldn’t take it anymore wondering that the school year was going to look like. He told me, “we will stay in La Vernia. Sign the kids up for school, even if something with the job comes up I will make it work from La Vernia. We will just stay still.” I accepted that as an answer and quit trying to figure it all out. I deleted the realtor app off my phone, and just STOPPED. No more house hunting, no more wondering, no more trying to make sense of it all.
The moment that I stopped trying to “figure it all out” and just rest in the fact that the Lord would not let us down, is the moment that I finally felt peace. The kids started school, I remodeled my home office for the boutique, because after all, we were settled in for the school year at least.
OR SO WE THOUGHT. (Are you sensing a trend here?)
September 10, 2019. Only 2.5 weeks after school starts. My father in law told us he found a house for sale by owner and thought we might want to check it out. It was only a mile from our current home we were living at so we jumped in and drove over. There was a sign written in sharpie marker with a phone number on it. We called the number and the owner told us the code to the key box, and said go on in and check it out!

We walked through the house and I honestly walked into it like I walked into every house the past few months of my life. Skeptical. Sure, it was beautiful. It has 4 bedrooms perfect for our family, my favorite kind of layout, move in ready, clean, freshly painted, a gorgeous fenced in yard, a fireplace, a shop for John, and a wonderful location. What’s not to love? Seriously nothing wrong with it. BUT I didn’t have ANY intention of getting my hopes up over it. I’ve walked this road before. Fallen in love with houses, only to be told no you don’t qualify. No, we received a better offer. No, no, no.
John asked me, what do you think? I said I liked it, but that was all. He decided to call the owner back and talk with him a bit. The owner explained a little bit about the owner financing, what he was asking for the house, and told us if we were interested, to make an offer. John told him we wanted to sleep on it, and that he would touch base with him the next day. I am not sure how much sleep happened, haha, but we prayerfully made an offer the next day. We waited for his response that next evening, and I was completely blown away by what they told us. They accepted our offer, and said “We have received multiple phone calls on the house since you saw it yesterday, and we have had multiple offers already – some with even bigger down payments then yours. But we have been praying for the right buyer to come along for this house, and we feel the Lord is telling us that it is supposed to be you.”

My emotions are all over the place at this point, and still are to this day if I am being honest. WHAT?? Who says something like that? I kept waiting for the “ball to drop”. For the good news to be too good to be true. For something to be wrong with the house. For something to be wrong with sellers. For us to be scammed. (I told y’all I am skeptical!) I couldn’t wrap my head around it. With it being an owner finance we closed exactly one week later. The Lord literally had this house handpicked for us. We pray for God to give us “signs” to let us know what direction we are supposed to go. He delivered to us in the form of a little handwritten cardboard sign.

The key thing that I can look back on is the fact that we had to be okay with giving up our picture of perfect. We had to be okay, not knowing what the future held. We had to give up all of our own understanding and FULLY rely on the Lord. It was ONLY when we got to this place, and that we finally let go and rested in his sovereignty, that he opened up this door.

I am in LOVE with my home. It has been the central location for many family gatherings, including our annual trick or treat party (that I am already counting the days til this year. SO excited.), we have formed friendships with some of the most amazing neighbors, the neighborhood is quiet and filled with a lot of families that John grew up with our here, it feels safe. It feels comfortable. It feels like HOME. I sit in my kitchen and watch my kids run free in the backyard, and feel so grateful. We sit in the front yard and watch the kids go up and down the driveway on their bikes and scooters, and are living a new normal, a new perfect, a new dream. I don’t know what the Lord has in store for us in the future, but I know that I will sit and rest contently in what he has given us TODAY, and take each day as he leads.

I wanted to share this story because if it helps just one person who is going through a tough time, or a period of unknown, I am here to encourage you to stay strong in your faith. Stay close to the Lord, He IS faithful to remain true to his promises. Your blessing may come in a form that you do not expect it to, when you least expect it. That doesn’t mean you won’t feel hurt, frustration, and doubt. There are still times that I see pictures pop up in my memories of our old property and my heart aches a little. I miss my horse babies, and miss the memories we had out there. But I am COMPLETELY grateful for our home now, for the gift God placed right into our lap, and having a blast making new memories here at this home. I put complete trust in our wonderful Lord, and I am encouraging you to do the same. He will not let you down.