The Lord has answered our prayers!

WE ARE MOVING! After house hunting for 2 1/2 years we are finally moving to Cool! The Lord has blessed us with our dream home. It is the first home we found 2 1/2 years ago when we began this journey, but the house was too expensive and it never sold. It went to foreclosure and finally dropped to a price we could afford!

The Lord is so good and is taking care of all the details. It is a big job buying a house these days and it's scary how much extra it costs for everything. Things were costing a lot more than we planned and I was getting scared a few weeks ago, but Wes had faith and we continued to trust. Then the Lord gave us three days of blessings and encouraged us that we were making the right choices! The first day one of the pastors from our church called to tell us that he wants to buy our house! The second day we found out it wasn't going to cost $5000 dollars to truck our stuff to Cool, but only $200 if we rented a truck ourselves and that includes unlimited mileage! The third day we were floored to learn that our lender made a mistake and accidentally "locked" our interest rate in two weeks ago! This mistake was the best news we could have had since the rate was a 1/2 a percentage point lower than the current rate and rates have continued to rise! This is a savings of about $18,000 after 30  years! Only God could have done it! Thank you God! There have been many more examples of God taking over the details and we have such peace. Yes, we will miss Santa Cruz immensely. We LOVE our church family and friends so much! But, we feel this move will be such a blessing for our family. Our children are so excited too! We will have 2 acres, a barn, and lots more space! Here is a picture of Sophie on the front steps of our new home:

And Hannah coming out of the barn...

Thank you Lord for answering our prayers!

Waiting on the Lord

I wrote the following post in October of this year and saved it to finish later. I wanted to post it now before posting an update since the Lord has so generously answered our prayers...

Oct, 2010: Strength will rise when we wait upon the Lord...I often sing this song by Lincoln Brewster in the shower ;). I love it! It is so true! I think there are so many things that we don't wait on the Lord for, but instead we try to take over because we are sick of waiting and attempt to make things happen how we want them to happen. When we do this we rob ourselves of a blessing! If we can only learn to listen to God and wait on His perfect timing our lives would be so much more fulfilled! Oftentimes waiting goes against every natural instinct in our body and how we are made which makes it even more difficult. But that is what is required and that is what having faith is all about!

Our family has been house hunting for about 3 years. I have longed to be done with this chapter in our lives for a very long time, but we are still on it. God blessed us so incredibly with our current house almost 10 years ago. We owned a mobile home that was 1000 sq. ft and my hubby worked for a small company. The mobile home was great, but the mobile home park had a rule that you couldn't have more than 5 people in a two bedroom. We had just had our 3rd baby so we weren't sure what to do. We knew we wanted to trust the Lord with our family planning, but weren't sure what was going to happen. Then, the Lord provided an opportunity. Wes acquired a new job and doubled his salary, I started working for a charter school, and our mobile home doubled in value! All of these meant we could afford a bigger home and we were able to move into our current 2000 sq. ft. home. Then baby number 4, 5, and 6 came along and space got increasingly smaller again. Wes also works from home most of the time and space is so tight he has to work in the garage. So, there are 9 bodies in our home 24/7 and we started to feel like we needed to search for a new home. We have now been on the hunt for three years! God is so good and we know all will work out in His perfect timing!