Enduring My Impatience

I’m suffering a mild but steady bout of impatience. This month marks the seventh consecutive month that my house has been on the market. My wife and I “sold” the house in August and the buyers proceeded to pull out of the deal with three days to go before close of escrow. This was quite discouraging and was followed with tears and a lot of questions. One question was, “What idiots!”. Ok, that’s not a question. But you can just see the questions oozing out of that exasperated response. Why did they wait so long? Don’t they know we have my son’s wedding this weekend? Don’t they know we’ve sold a lot of furniture and packed up the kitchen, and now I can’t find the milkshake mixer? Don’t they know we’re moving? Don’t they know that while they were leading us on, our house was off the market and another house around the corner that was smaller than ours, and not as nice, and only slightly less expensive, and certainly not a house one would pick over ours, was sold, and closed, and I’m sure these other buyers would have picked our house had they had the opportunity to buy it? Don’t they know I’ve put in notice at my work? Oy!

So, the dominoes have fallen. The movers cancelled, the storage un-rented, the career recovered (thanks boss!), “some” stuff unpacked. Now we start the process all over again, but with less furniture (one large room nearly empty but for the borrowed items), no pictures on the walls, and of course we must keep the house clean at all times because you never know when someone might want to come over and have a look. And of course, no more of daddy’s special milkshakes.

What motivated us to try this “sell the house and move thing”? We wanted a simpler life. What have we gained? A lot of chaos, stress, and the pleasure of explaining what happened over and over and over again to folks at work, at church, in our neighborhood. Going away parties had been thrown for us, going away presents given too us, plans of others were made around our plans. Have I said “Oy!”?

We’ve unwound all of this stuff and “hope” to get to wind it all up again, soon.

My will has been thwarted and I’m sinning because of it. My humility is lacking. My patience is running thin. I feel guilty for wanting what I want. I’m usually pretty skilled at just putting this stuff away and not dwelling on it, but my family is affected (especially my fetching wife, God bless her) by all of the uncertainty. And to top it all off, my newly married son is now away from us living with his bride. We gained the daughter we always wanted and promptly lost her and our first born son as they preceded us to our future hometown. Ok, we didn’t lose them but she’s not here where I can give her a hug, is she? And he’s not here where I can encourage him man to man instead of phone to phone.

I feel shafted.


[cut!]

[take two]


Enduring My Impatience
This month marks the seventh consecutive month that my house has been on the market. While that is a discouraging circumstance, let me tell you about the blessing God poured out on us. In August we “sold” our home and this happened in a very, very soft market. It’s been the only offer we’ve received this entire time. Unfortunately, the buyers backed out at the last minute and so we get to start the entire process over again.

Where’s the blessing you ask? The buyers backed out for no good reason and so they forfeited their earnest money or deposit of $5,000 to us. Due to this we were able to give a substantial sum to a missionary couple that our church is sending to the Philippines. We also will be giving a substantial sum to our local crisis pregnancy center at a fund raising dinner this evening. And to top it all off we have invested some of the money in repairs to our home that we had decided not to spend money on.

Look, instead of receiving no offers to this day and having nothing to show for it, we have used a blessing that God has provided us to help spread the gospel to an unreached tribe, to help young mothers choose life, and to repair our home for an even better chance at selling in this market.

God is great and greatly to be praised!

There…that’s much better.

When Worldviews Collide

Ah, Halloween approaches. And so comes another face to face meeting of my new Christianity and my old world view. For 42 years Halloween was…well…Halloween! Dressing up, knocking on doors, begging for candy, handing out candy, sorting candy, trading candy with my sisters. Of course I stopped doing the door-to-door thing myself at around 13 or so, but that doesn’t change what Halloween was.


So, now I’m a Christian and I hear that Halloween is evil and I shouldn’t partake. “Halloween glorifies evil”, I hear (and it certainly does). Vampires, witches, ghosts, serial killers, and all manner of “the undead”, flit from house to house
demanding candy. What am I, a “new creation”, with candy hungry kids, to do? I could forbid my children from participating. We could darken our house and pretend we’re not home or leave and go to the mall to avoid the sugar fueled hordes.

Avoidance. That’s not being a very good witness, so we will participate to some extent. I’m just not sure how much. We’ll also, as a family, re-evaluate when this season is over and try to establish a plan for how best to glorify God in the future.


Oh, and candy corn rules. Don't even argue with me!