Awakenings

I thought about telling you about Valentine's Day, but it just seemed mean to leave you hanging on the house adventure story, so we'll save Valentine's Day for another day. Besides, I think about 90% of you who are regular readers are just a hair short of chucking a heavy object at me, and I don't want to make you any more angry than you already are!!!

If you are behind on blogs and have no idea what I'm talking about, you'll want to go back and read the posts from last week that chronicle the beginning of this story. Part one, part two, and part three can be read by clicking on each link.

So when I left you last Friday, we were waiting to see a second house, similar to the one we toured a few days before, so we could decide which one we liked better. It actually turned out to be such a perfect timing thing, because our appointment to see house #2 fell on our 38th monthiversary. I could think of nothing more romantic than spending extra time together that day, strolling through our potential future home. Ryan had driven by the house a couple of times in the interim and reported that it looked wonderful from the outside, and we'd looked at houses in that neighborhood before, so we knew we liked that much, at least.

The day before our monthiversary, Cathy emailed. "You're not going to believe this," she said, "but that house we're supposed to see tomorrow sold today."

Actually, I can totally believe that. This is us, remember? Good luck charm for houses everywhere? I stared at her words on the screen and had two thoughts. 1. Why do these sellers get ALL THE LUCK? 2. I'm not mad that the house sold. Not even a little bit.

I texted Ryan, who was at work. "The second house sold, and I'm not even mad. Are you?"

He answered immediately. "No. I'm not. I want the house we saw."

We knew in that very instant that the one we'd been through was home. There was no need to see another house because we were already in love. We knew it was ludicrous in the eyes of many to not look at a thousand houses before picking one, but this tends to be the way life works for us. We got married quickly because we just knew. I picked out my wedding dress in ten minutes because I just knew. When we know, we know. And we knew.

Unfortunately knowing we love a house and getting said house are not necessarily a natural pairing. We knew the house we loved had just had an open house before we toured it. What if someone else was living our same story, but they got there first? What if the house already had an offer and we didn't know? {We've learned that despite realtor.com's tag line of being updated in real time every fifteen minutes, a house might be pending or sold and still be sitting there looking all up for grabs online.}

So even that day - February 1 - Ryan and I paced and prayed from our respective locations. I stewed and wondered if the people living in that house even remotely thought we might be interested.

And that's when it happened.

As I paced and stewed, I got a text from Cathy. Remember how I told you the only item of discussion when we toured the house was whether or not our table would fit in the kitchen? And how I insisted I could make it work in the great room? Well apparently in her remarks back to the listing agent, Cathy had relayed some or all of that conversation, because the homeowners proceeded to put all the leaves in their kitchen table, gathered up all the chairs and put them around the table, and sent a photo to their Realtor to show how a bigger table would, in fact, fit in the kitchen. She sent it to Cathy, who forwarded it to me.

This may not be a big deal to you, but it made me cry. I cried for-real tears, because it showed me that these people were kind and invested in the sale of their home. The same sort of kind and invested that Ryan and I would be in the sale of our own home. This would be the very kind of thing Ryan would do for someone potentially interested in our place.

Remember how I said I scratched a home from our list because the seller was being picky about how clean it was when we wanted to see it? I didn't want to enter a legal contract with her because if she was that picky over a showing, I couldn't imagine doing business with her? Well the same was true {in the most opposite way} of this text. If these people were willing to go the extra mile over a kitchen table, they were exactly the kind of people we wanted to do business with. How fortunate for us that they lived in this house. It gave us a lot of hope about the kind of people they are and the kind of care and investment they'd put toward the house and toward us, we hoped.

And so it was that on our 38th monthivesary, we both declared we were in love with that darling little house we'd walked through just five days earlier. In the span of five days, we'd gone from casually walking through to being down on our knees, clutching that kitchen table photograph, asking God if this was the way we should go. And hoping beyond hope He would say yes.

To be continued...

{And before you send me hate mail, let me just remind you that we hate "to be continued" as much as you do, but this is actually HOW the story is going in our real time!! Welcome to our life!!}