Good Soil: providence

Showing posts with label providence. Show all posts

Friday, February 27, 2015

400 Years of Silence. Or Something Like That.

It's been ... um ... a little while since I've written.

Like, a year.

My friend Abby—whose oldest 3 children are a boy and twin girls, 21 months apart—once told me that when the twins were born, she just lost a whole year of her life. Not like her life expectancy was shortened by a year, but like a whole year went by and she didn't know what had happened.

I relate.

Being a family of five still feels like a new thing...so crazy!

Elijah (kid #3) turned one this month. I have no idea where that year went.

The Rains Have Returned

The Lord will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty,

to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands.
– Deuteronomy 28:12

There's always been something about rain for me.

Growing up on the farm, I learned early that the crops—and therefore the paychecks—were dependent on the Lord opening the sky and watering the earth. I remember sitting on the front porch of the big cement block farmhouse, my dad in his big chaise lounge lawn chair and me in my small one, covered in a green blanket, breathing in the damp, fragrant air and enjoying the thunder concert.

God at Work

2011 was a year of hard things. Josiah was born, which is a wildly good thing. But anyone who's ever given birth knows that it's also a hard thing. And the newborn days? They are hard for me. I am not one of those moms who weathers the tiny baby stage with grace. I survive it by the skin of my teeth. Sleep deprivation is just not a good thing for me.

And beyond that ... hard things. Hard things at work. Hard things in marriage. Hard things in our extended family. I hate that I'm being vague, but the details of these things are just not OK to slap on a blog. And still, I need to say at least that much to give a context for what I'm about to say. Because when I try to sum up 2012, I have to reach back to 2011 first.

2012 in three words:

God at Work.

This past year saw the working out of a lot of things that had begun in pain the year before. And to be honest, some of them are still painful. And sometimes I was exhausted. Confused. Frustrated. Disheartened. But always there was a sense of God being at work. Always. I literally can't think of a moment when I didn't feel that.

He was there telling me He loves me. He was there pulling details together in ways I didn't imagine. He was there giving me strength to keep going when I felt like giving up.

Moving into 2013, His work is still in progress. I look forward to seeing what comes from His hand in the next year.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

50 Hours on the Market

When we bought our townhome in 2005, we only expected to live here for about three years. We thought that when Josh graduated from UCCS in May 2008, he would find a job, and we would sell this house and buy one big enough to start a family in.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

Little did we know that Josh would graduate in an economy that didn't really lend itself to finding a job quickly. Or selling a house quickly. It took him seven months to find a job. (We are so thankful and thank God often that we are both employed right now.) Meanwhile, we put our house on the market in July 2008. It was up for a year. I got soooo tired of having to leave it in showing condition everyday. Some days we took the gamble: no one will want to come see the house today. Then, if we did get a call, we'd run home to clean it up before the showing. We left it on the market until 2.5 weeks before Lorien was born, so you can imagine me rushing home, eight months pregnant and cleaning like a crazy woman ... all for nothing. In that whole year, we got one offer, and it was so low that we couldn't afford to accept it.

We decided that moving with a newborn was out of the question, so we stayed off the market for the last seven months. Recently, though we decided we ought to take advantage of the tax credit for first-time home buyers (since that's probably who is going to buy our house) and get it back on the market. I was dreading—dreading—the pressure to keep it clean. Having a baby didn't make that any easier.

Insanity Week

Since the current real estate market has made it difficult to rack up much equity in our house, we decided to go with a flat-fee listing service and save ourselves paying commission to a real estate agent (even though we have an agent whom we love). To cover ourselves, we decided to work instead with a real estate attorney who would charge us a fraction of a realtor's fee to to the contracting for us. We filled out the forms to list the house on Monday night. It was supposed to hit the MLS by Tuesday night, but there was a glitch and it didn't go live until Wednesday at 2 p.m.

At 3:00 p.m. we got a call for a showing at 4:30. Thankfully, I was working from home that day and could drop what I was doing to get the house ready to show. I got it all done except for 2 dirty pots, which I left in the sink. Lorien and I went to Focus to see Josh, since he was working late. While we were there, we got a call from the Realtor doing the showing, saying that his client was very interested. After a minimal amount of verbal negotiating, we got a formal offer at about 8:00 p.m.

The next day, Thursday, we had another showing. And another offer. It amounted to about $4000 less, because it included a request for us to pay the buyer's loan closing costs. We let them know that we already had another offer and asked if they would like to beat it (thinking they wouldn't, but they did).

Both offers were reasonable, but both also came with slight risks. (The first had a contingency for the sale of her current property, and the second was financing almost the whole amount and asking for closing costs on top, so there was a high bar for the appraisal.)

We spent all day Thursday on the phone negotiating and working out the contracts. Seriously—Josh and I both nearly ran our phones out of batteries talking on them. Friday morning we commenced again. By Friday at noon we had reached a verbal agreement to accept the first offer (the one with the contingency). And at 4:00 p.m. we signed the counterproposal and went under contract.

Fifty hours. Unbelievable.

In the midst of all the negotiating and trying to figure out which was the better deal, Dad Keffer put it this way: "The one thing that's clear is that you were not supposed to sell your place the last time around, and that you are supposed to sell it this time around." Thank goodness!

Now we just have to make it to closing on March 24 and get the money in the bank!

Just for fun, here are the house photos we used for the MLS listing (for those of you who haven't seen where we've been living for the past 4.5 years).