Tuesday May 29, 2012

The rental lease is signed. After two months of agonizing over no showings, we listed the house on the rental market also. Boom bang. One week later our realtor called with not one but two showings. Completely inconvenient timing. I was getting ready to fly to Oregon the next day and I needed every minute of my day at home. Two hours out for you to show the house? Groan. I called David and ranted. Really, underneath it all was a deceptively hidden layer of “I’m struggling with saying goodbye.” It helped so much to realize what was going on. To acknowledge the hard part and let it go {again}.

An hour later another realtor called. “I have someone who wants to see your house on Wednesday.” You have got to be kidding me. I hemmed and hawed and told her what was up. She said she’d see if her client could come later after I’d gone.

Tuesday she called to switch up the timing. I was scrubbing the basement within an inch of its life. You know something big is happening when you start cleaning the windows of the storage barn, the internal soap dispenser of the washer, and the crevices of an unfinished basement used for storage.

“So, the person who was going to come at three o’clock wants to come earlier and I said fine, but that he’d have to come at one o’clock because there is a second showing at two. He was very unhappy about that and said he may want to rent your house on the spot.”

We’ve been a little leery of renting. What if they default? What if they trash the house? What if….what if…. It feels vulnerable. But for me, it also feels like a much more gentle goodbye.

I really, really, REALLY wanted to meet whoever was going to rent. Even our realtor recommended it, but things got a little sticky with me leaving for the weekend. After a bit of discussion she suggested I be there for the showing instead of leaving. I was totally stoked and when she heard my level of enthusiasm, she said she’d purposely come a few minutes late to give me some one on one time with them. It’s crazy how much you can sense about people within five minutes of being with them.

1:00 arrived and so did the first potential renters. I went out to say hello not sure if they’d be friendly or feel irritated that the realtor wasn’t there. They bounced right out of the car with their two teenage boys, the youngest of whom has downs syndrome. Seeing him made me feel safe with them. In a world of people who sue their doctor’s because they would have aborted the child in their arms had they known he was handicapped, seeing a family embracing their child even in something like a house showing was strangely reassuring. I knew our values jibed at least a little. In the next five minutes, I discovered they have eleven kids (blow me away) and that almost all of them are married and scattered throughout the northwest. He told me he’s an engineer and being transferred to a plant about twenty minutes from our house. They built their own seven bedroom home soon after they were married. Since he is so close to retirement, they’re renting out their own home because they want to go back to it. Sound familiar?

We got inside the front door and I offered to give them a tour or let them look around at will. She said, “I want to see your laundry.” Great. The basement. Definitely the most unimpressive room in the house. So much for first impressions. From there he and I went to the barn to see the mower because he was worried about the grass. She went back up to the main floor. When we all met again, I offered them a glass of tea and to my surprise they accepted. No airs going on here.

I asked if she’d been upstairs and she said no. He said, “Anything up there is a bonus. I’m ready to write the check.” We were in our bedroom, the last room on our tour, when the realtor arrived. “Where’s the application,” he asked. “I’m ready to sign.” Minutes earlier, he’d literally begged me to rent the house to them. “This is our fourth trip to Virginia and they’ve all been dead ends.” His job starts June fourth. Clearly, they are getting desperate.

Instead of taking the application and returning it, he sat at the kitchen table and filled it out. Meanwhile the boys and I sat in the living room. “Hmm, I just noticed something I didn’t notice,” B said. “No TV.”

Nope, no TV.

“We don’t either,” he answered. I was in shock. The house is wired for cable access, but it surprised me to have him notice the lack of an actual set.

It wasn’t long until I was wishing David was there. I mean, we’d agreed I have a stronger intuition when reading people, but I wasn’t prepared for setting lease agreements on the spot. One year or two or three? I said two then freaked and called David who said the same thing. It makes the most sense. Our bare minimum stay at camp is two years. Knowing we have tenants for that entire time is incredibly, marvelously freeing.

On Tuesday David and I had started talking seriously about rental logistics and the possibility of leaving a few things in storage in the basement. Even before I mentioned it, they were already offering that we could leave things there.

We told them we’d probably be back one weekend a year to do annual maintenance like exterior painting. They said, “Fine, but I don’t mind helping with that.” It is huge to me that they built their own house because, like they say at camp, “You value what you work for.” I just don’t see them trashing the house.

And then I got the biggest surprise of all. As they were leaving, she leaned in and said, “I just want you to know there won’t be any smoking or drinking or partying going on here. We don’t do that kind of stuff. We want to glorify God and we want everything in our home to glorify Him, too.”

Honestly, we had no intentions of discriminating based on religion. It never even entered our thought process at any point along the way. We only wanted to know we could trust them not to rip us off. To have someone say, “We’ve been praying and praying and running into dead ends and when we saw your house, we knew this was it.” Well, that almost gives me goosebumps. Because we’ve been praying and praying, too, and not until we understood that God might want us to try renting the house instead of selling could their prayers and ours be answered.

If this were the sixtieth chapter of Genesis, we’d probably be building an altar of remembrance. “That they might remember how the Lord led them out of Virginia,” you know.

In retrospect, it feels so incredible. Yes, it was horrible to live with so much unknown and wonder if we’d read God wrong. But now that it’s over, I look back in total amazement that we only had to go through two actual showings (they’re crazy time-consuming).

They’re moving to Virginia to start his job June fourth. The earliest available date we listed was June 25th. Don’t ask me WHY I thought someone might want to start renting it about the middle of July. Perhaps it’s time to channel that little bit of adrenalin junkie hiding inside.

And while I’m running and packing, y’all can all join us in prayer some more. We need a house to live in and Brian keeps running into dead ends in Maryland. Can’t wait to see how the story gets written!

*** and this is where I thank God for three hour road trips to Maryland that let me type ***

• ← Tuesday May 29, 2012
• Friday June 15, 2012 →