Perfection in His timing

I have spent many an hour wondering what God has in store for my life.  I've worried that my greatest desires would always be just beyond my reach.  I remember the anxiety and pain that I felt when Randall and I were first married.  I struggled with wanting to have children and every month realizing it wasn't going to happen and then having a miscarriage once I was pregnant.  I remember wondering if I was ever going to be able to hold my own child in my arms.  And do you know what happened?  One month later I was pregnant again and eight months later we had our amazing son Ashton only to be followed by Jenna and Shiloh and now baby #4.  But in hind sight I can say that the trials we endured to have them all have only made our love and compassion that much sweeter.

For 8 years we have lived with and cared for Randall's grandfather.  There were times that I seriously thought I was the one loosing my mind.  But there were also just as many times that my soul smiled when beautiful things happened.  Shiloh loves grandpa and spends more time with him than either of my other children do.  She asks him to swing her in the backyard.  The man stood there and pushed her for two hours!  She loves to crawl in his lap and take a nap with him when he's snoozing in his recliner. And she loves to play catch with him and her squishy nerf balls.  These moments have made me smile.  And they also make me wonder if we needed to be here after all these years so that she could develop a relationship with her great-grandpa.

At Thanksgiving, we had been praying about what to do since Randall was laid off.  We truly felt like moving to North Dakota was our only and best option.  So, we dove in to trying to arrange all the details and get things set up on the other end so that everything would go smoothly.  But, things kept falling through and when things seemed the bleakest just before Christmas, Randall received a phone call that changed everything.  It was a permanent full-time job offer from a company that had previously laid him off.  With the new job under his belt, I wanted to test the waters...

I knew we needed to be in our own space in order to have room for baby #4.  I scoured classified, talked to people and friends and determined that rent was way out of our price range here.  But, the crazy thing was if we could qualify for a loan, our mortgage would be half of what the going rate for rent is here.  Seriously?!?  So I started to look at the houses for sale in our area.  I found about 20 that were in a price range that I thought we'd be able to carry a mortgage on.  But, I also knew that banks had really reined in what and who they would qualify for a loan for awhile now.  So I honestly didn't think we would qualify for anything.  With butterflies in my stomach, I called the bank.  Ten minutes of questions later, I was staring at my inbox at a letter from the bank saying that we pre-qualified and could take our letter to the Realtor and buy a house.  I couldn't believe it.  But then waves of excitement hit me and the very next day I drove around with the kids and looked at potential properties.  And the day after that, we took Randall around and narrowed our search down to 6.  We called our Realtor and made appointments and found a move in ready home with a really great kitchen.  Today, we'll be submitting our offer.  And after almost 11 years of being married and moving around and living in someone else's house, we could actually be home owners.

So, I'm beginning to understand that God's timing is perfect.  This home that could be ours, we wouldn't have been able to afford when the market was better.  All the growing up that I needed to do, probably wouldn't have come so easily if our experiences and our choices to follow personal revelation were any different than they were.  While many of my friends and family can attest, I hated living in limbo, I have found healing in relationships I thought would always be fractured.  I have found a true love of myself that I didn't think would ever come.  And I have found joy in even the most painful and darkest of circumstances.  Yes, my Heavenly Father has used this incubation time to mold me into a much better person than I was 11 years ago.  I'm far from perfect, but with His love I think I'm getting closer.