Because I Need Something Else to Do This Time of Year

I'm a little hesitant sharing this, but we're all friends, right? And since we're all friends, here's the news: we're trying to buy a house (this one, actually):

Before you jump to the conclusion that teaching pays a lot better than perhaps you thought, don't - it doesn't. In fact, we wouldn't have a chance at this house if 1) it weren't a foreclosure, 2) the market weren't so soft, and 3) we didn't have some help from family. If you've ever bought a home before, you know it's one thing to buy one, quite another thing to afford one. We're still trying to figure out if we can really do both; in the meantime, there's no harm in bidding.

If you know us at all, you probably know we tend to buy houses by accident; that is, we've never gone "househunting" or even wasted time thinking about it. Instead, what usually happens is somebody tells us about a house they think would be great for us, we investigate it, start with a lowball offer, negotiate, and voila - we just bought a house. It's happened this way twice before, and seems to be happening again (we made our lowball offer last night). Think of it as Groundhog Day with real estate.

I'd go into more detail about the house, but we've learned through experience the importance of holding onto the possibilities of home ownership with open hands, and details tend to work against us doing that. Proverbs 13:12 says, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life." The challenge for us has always been to balance our hope for a new-to-us house with the reality that, because we've never had much money to just buy our way into something, the possibility of losing said house is very real also. The same is true here, so I'll hold off for now with the specifics.

Another thing we've learned to be aware of in buying a home is the subtle attitude that says, "If God loves us, he will make it so we can get this house." The problem with this is we are setting our terms for God to demonstrate his love for us, when Romans tells us he already has ("God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us"). We'd prefer to trust God to determine his terms, as the Scriptures promises they're always better (even if we don't think so at the time).

All this isn't to say we won't be disappointed if the deal eventually falls through (we would be), but after doing this twice before, it feels like we might be learning (finally) to agree a little more with the psalmist when he wrote Psalm 73:25: "Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth I desire besides you." We certainly haven't arrived in this area of trust just yet, but a sense of progress - even ever so slight - is always encouraging.

More to come (we hope).