A Year In A Marvelous Life

As I sit by the starlit tree, with my steamy mug of Caribou Reindeer Blend and this book that I counted the days of Advent with last year,

ο»Ώ

I marvel . . .


Last year she gave me a copy of her new book. (Me and all the other hundreds of Allume-attenders)


Ann Voskamp (Photo credit hers) writes in her book, The Greatest Gift: On day 14: “In what areas of your life do you need Christ’s light to dawn?”


And I wrote: “Our future, (it’s not dark, but obscure) where will we live? What will we do?”


Living in what I had titled our ‘layover home’ ~ It was our former home and we were renting from the school teacher who purchased it from us twelve years prior. Stowed away in the large brick house, fighting with fire to keep it warm (fire in a wood-stove)  in the sub-zero weather of Snowmageddon 2013 (remember that?), and looking for a foreclosure to flip.


After having our farm on the market for the better of four years, we were happy with the price we received, because you know, the economy. We wanted to invest what we came out with in something that would grow. We had in mind to better ourselves financially because we didn’t want to take out a 30 year mortgage mid-life. Ahem. πŸ™‚


So, through prayer and providential circumstances, we believed it was God who placed it on our hearts to pursue flipping a house in a poor economy. In a less-trafficked real-estate area. Otherwise we might think we were crazy. (Okay, we kind of are . . . truly. But knowing God was leading us, we reminded ourselves often through the course of it, and it kept us from being discouraged!)


Initially, we didn’t know if He would have us live in the house while we fixed it up or what, but we pursued this dream in the blistering cold. (Did you know foreclosed houses are not heated and feel colder inside than it is outdoors? It’s true! It was a painful pursuit in more ways than one!)


We had until the end of the school year to move, and long about March we were wondering WHAT we were going to do, and finally found that house we felt we’d love to live in, and would be worth fixing.


And then we found another one.


Shortly after negotiations were well underway for the ‘flip house’. And on a late weekend in April, we closed on our flip house and (long story short) my husband’s new employer closed on the other one for us.


The other one which was on a little lake. Ultimately that is where we wanted to end up. On a lake. God knew.  Only God.  More than we could ask or imagine. Ephesians 3:20


We marvel . . .


Suddenly then, we had in our care THREE homes!!! (and THREE electric bills!) Both of the homes we acquired had been vacant and needed work. We had to decipher how we would manage this ‘dilemma’. And we knew we needed to get out of the one we were living in , which meant readying the lake house, moving, and then we would get to work on the flip house.


Today, after a crazy, wild, seven-month period: May through November, we have a Christmas tree twinkling in our little lake home, the flip-house has been flipped (Look for that story tomorrow), and . . .


And I’d never have dreamed it a year ago.


Marveling . . .


And D had taken a lower-income, much closer-to-home job to find a place of rest from the turbulent labor of the Bismarck, ND commercial construction stress. To cease traveling, living away from home and just ‘be’.


Which turned out to be a perfect fitting job in every way as we had extra time just when we needed it to get our houses done, and we have this lake house as part of his contract with the company he works for. He commutes 15 minutes.


He marvels . . .


And God has begun to open the doors for me to speak outside of my church, just as He told me He would way back in 1995. When I had worked toward this goal for all these years, that the “now” is finally here ~ one more thing to marvel over.


Timing. Details. All of it directed by the hand of our life-giving, lavish-loving God.


Marvelous . . . He is.ο»Ώ


No doubt you have a marvelous story too. Have you considered the happenings of your 2014 yet?

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