Thursday May 17, 2012

It’s the first week of summer vacation for Adam and we couldn’t be more thrilled! I LOVE having that little, er big, guy home all day. We love waking up slowly in the morning. Adam said it perfectly Monday morning when I told him breakfast was ready, “GOOD. Now I can enjoy my breakfast instead of just hurry, hurry, hurry.”

Monday morning wasn’t exactly lazy though. We had our first house showing. Two months after putting it on the market and day one of it going live on the rental market. Talk about an adrenalin rush and a kick in the gut simultaneously. It’s like hosting bipolar emotions in one body. David and I sent the boys out to the van Saturday morning before Adam’s end of the year school picnic. We stood there in the kitchen, arms wrapped around each other and prayed that God would give us a showing this weekend. It’s hard to know how to pray sometimes. We still both feel God is calling us to camp, but how that is supposed to play out has felt really unclear in the months of nothing. I naively thought that if God wanted us to go camp, He was going to provide a miracle buyer within two weeks of listing it in the MLS system.

In those next four weeks of nothing, we wondered. My faith was wavering. Some days I wondered if we’d totally misread God. One Sunday morning in our pre-service prayer meeting I asked the ladies to help us pray that God would give us wisdom in knowing what to do. Are we supposed to rent it out? Are we supposed to slash the price and learn what it really means to sacrifice? Or are we not supposed to go? We are more than willing to do any of them. We’ll go. We’ll stay. We’ll take a loss. But we need to KNOW it’s what God wants us to do. And that Sunday Shirley prayed that God would give us a confirmation that we were supposed to go to camp. The following Thursday David called about a bike on Craigslist. We’re hoping to go down to one vehicle when we move to save money and so that David can get regular exercise since his job will mostly be desk and phone related.

The bike was about a hundred more than we were hoping to spend and David asked him what his best offer is. He told him what we are doing and that he’s hoping to use the bike for transportation to and from work. The guy made an offer (still high) and David said he’d call me to talk about it. My mom and sister showed up when we were on the phone and we hung up without being able to finish the conversation. Before I remembered to call him back, David called me. “So the guy just called me back and said he has no idea why he’s doing this, but he wants to give it to us for $400.” Talk about goosebumps.

Sometimes I can’t believe it’s been nine months since we first talked about going to camp. Everything seems to happen so slowly and yet fly by. When I think about it being nine months and we’ve had so little confirmation, I wonder how we can believe we are still supposed to go. When I think about moving, it feels like time is flying way too fast. Sometimes it feels like Abraham. Only getting the tiniest whisper about what is supposed to happen next. The father of many nations when you’re childless and your wife is past menopause? Moving to camp but not only are you not selling, you don’t even get showings? But underneath it all …. underneath the circumstances that seem to speak otherwise …. underneath the days when everything inside of me screams I don’t want to move …. underneath it all is a quiet understanding that this is what God wants. And at exactly the right time, it will happen. Just when our faith starts wavering, we get another tiny confirmation.

Saturday morning in the kitchen, I can’t say I had a huge amount of faith. Just enough to get the realtor book out and plop it on the island. And then we left for the school picnic where we don’t have cell phone service. Funny. From the school picnic, we headed straight to our church youth explosion weekend. I checked as soon as we had service. Nothing. Sunday afternoon as we loaded in the van after youth explosion, I checked my phone. One voicemail. I thought it was from Mom until I heard a male voice. “Hi Michelle, this is Mike from Remax ……………” Who said you need to go skydiving? I can get an adrenalin rush just from a voice mail. Especially when that voice mail is a direct answer to a prayer you prayed with shaky faith.

And here we are. One positive feedback showing, but no offers. I am more convinced than ever that God is going to finish this story at exactly the right time. One baby step at a time. Meanwhile, we are going to enjoy our summer instead of stressing. And get annoyed at Goldi who ran away again. No lightning last night but the bear dumped our trash can again. As he did the other time she ran away. Maybe that’s the common denominator. I feel really annoyed at having to pick her up. She refuses to jump into the van which means lifting the hulk of her, one half at at time.

But at least it’s summer. I can deal with almost anything when it’s summer.

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