The Snowball Effect

Podcast Day! And yes, we're talking about the house {some} and our non-bungee-jumping Valentine's Date! But never fear...the blog story continues below!!

 Click here to listen

Despite my begging to the contrary, you hate me, don't you? All the to be continued-ing? Like I said yesterday, it's how the story is going for us, too, and I assure you that even as you read this today, we do not know the details of how it all will end. So parts of it are as much a mystery to me as they are to you!!

Okay. So I told you we decided we loved this darling little house we'd walked through and yet we had no clue if anyone else also loved it like we did.

On our monthiversary, we prayed. A serious, heads-bowed, on-our-knees kind of prayer. The kind of hit-the-floor prayer that we hoped demonstrated the utter seriousness of our hearts. As we prayed, Ryan felt overwhelmed with a nudge to get paperwork started to make this a reality. And when we stood up from our hit-the-floor prayer, he did just that very thing.

Whoa.

The next day, he called the listing agent of the house we loved and thanked her personally for sending the text of the kitchen table and conveyed to her that we had fallen hard and fast for this house and were putting paperwork in motion to make it ours. He hung up the phone, still anxious in not knowing if we were up against anyone else, but comforted that he had done what he could to make our case known. {The listing agent later told Cathy that in all her years of real estate, no buyer has ever called to offer personal thanks and hope and that Ryan's call was extremely impressive to her.}

While Ryan got busy on more paperwork for our future, I met with Cathy to once again list our house for sale. It was both exciting and defeating to have this meeting with her. I wonder sometimes if all our neighbors have some sort of betting pool on when we're going to list our house AGAIN and how long it will take for us to give up after it doesn't sell. Five years of signs flying in and out of the yard has to be comical to watch - unless, of course, the signs are in YOUR yard.

When Cathy came with all the paperwork, her assistant came to take pictures. I shook her hand and Cathy mentioned in passing that this home had been my grandparents' house. The woman asked me who my grandparents were, and when I told her their names {keep in mind they both passed away when I was in high school}, her jaw dropped clear to the floor. "I worked for your Grandma" she started, and I finished for her - "at the bakery, right?"

Goose bumps.

With all our paperwork in place to list our house and to be ready to buy a new one, Ryan and I asked Cathy if we could make a contingent offer on the house we loved. She came back with good news and bad news. The good news was, we could definitely make an offer. The bad news was, the people who owned the house had an offer of their own in on THEIR new dream home. And if they didn't close by a certain date, they risked losing that house. They were willing to meet us in the middle as much as they could by delaying the closing of the house they were selling/we were buying to the last possible day before they HAD to close if it would help us to have more time to sell our house.

And so it was that on Thursday, February 4th, one week after we walked through the house we never planned to love, we signed an offer for that very home.

Within about twelve hours, they counter-offered and just past quittin' time on Friday, we sat in Cathy's office signing the counter-offer.

We went home to eat clean-eating-approved Chinese food and stared at each other.

Did we just buy a house?

And more importantly - we needed a straight-up miracle where our own home was concerned. It didn't matter that the house hadn't sold in five years. We needed it to sell on the double.

Back when we still owned Ryan's Greentown house, we made a solemn vow that we would never again own two homes. And we thought long and hard about that - and more than mere thinking - we prayed long and hard about that before we signed the offer. But we knew in our souls that this wasn't just impulsive Shafferness we were participating in. Based on the specific prayers we had prayed over the last week or so, God had unmistakably opened doors we did not ever expect to see open. Moving forward was the right choice, and we knew it in our hearts. We also knew we were about to walk into the biggest faith challenge we'd seen yet in our marriage.

And it scared us to death.

To be continued...and since I know you're mad about that, I'll just ask that every time you get the urge to yell at me, pray for our house to sell instead, okay?? That should garner a lot of prayer!! :)