Accepted.
That’s a beautiful word. It was even more beautiful to Micah and me when we received official pre-approval for a home loan. We have been waiting for a long time to buy a house. The time was right. We decided not to renew our lease for the coming year and all the signs pointed to this being the right time to find that perfect home.
We went into the process with hopeful expectations – tour houses, pick one, submit offer, done. Maybe we would have to do that twice.
It didn’t end up working out like that.
Our family has loved living in Mount Horeb and we have felt very called to this community. Our top priority was to find a home in Mount Horeb and continue with the relationships and life that we have built here. Our first offer was on a house in Mount Horeb. Not accepted.
We then submitted an offer on a house in Oregon. And then another house in Mount Horeb. Both were not accepted.
We were starting to feel slightly defeated. We kept holding on to the hope that God had the right place for us. So, we started packing. We had nowhere to go but a May 31 deadline loomed. We decided to act like God was going to give us a home. We prayed together. We prayed separately. We asked friends to pray. And we hoped.
It was at that point that I had to accept that God may be calling us to leave Mount Horeb for a new place and a new community. It was also during this time that I really struggled. We had yet another offer turned down and it felt like this new home just wasn’t going to happen.
Micah and I were frustrated and confused. Was God really asking us to start over in a new place? But what about the strong convictions we had that God was using us here, in Mount Horeb? Were we not meant to buy a house? We know that God can work miracles. We have seen it countless times in our lives. And yet, as much as we were confident in God’s power, we were swimming in doubt. We needed a miracle and it just didn’t look like it was going to happen. I began questioning God, and the more I questioned, the less I trusted.
But, we kept packing.
We toured homes in Belleville, McFarland, Oregon, Mount Horeb. We widened our search to Stoughton, Black Earth, Brooklyn and Blue Mounds. Two more unaccepted offers.
After the last offer was declined, Micah and I were feeling incredibly defeated. We didn’t know what God was doing. We wanted to trust. We wanted to hope in that miracle. It was getting increasingly hard to believe that it would happen.
On Monday night, April 17th, my sister sent me a listing of a house in Mount Horeb. It was a house that hadn’t come up on any of the apps we were using. It didn’t come up in our realtor’s search parameters for us. When I opened the link, I knew why – it wasn’t a fully detached house. It shared a wall, a zero lot line. It was nothing like what we had been looking at. I almost wrote it off.
On Tuesday, April 18th, at 1:15pm, we toured the home. We left uncertain. We returned home and gathered as a family to pray. We asked God for clarity. We asked for him to give us the desires of our hearts and to unite us a family. And then we packed.
At 5:30pm our realtor contacted us to say there were no offers on the house and we could probably offer less than asking. Until this point, each home we offered on had 6-8 other offers and we were offering far more than the listing price for each one. This one had ZERO offers. The family wanted to close ASAP, and we needed to close before May 31. Every other home we offered on would have caused us to extend our current lease into June. At 6pm we submitted an offer. At 7pm we got the call– accepted! As of May 15 we will be home owners in Mount Horeb.
God heard our hearts. He had something far more beautiful in mind than what we were even searching for. He provided our unexpected miracle.
