We Get to Stay in Our House!

Last weekend, Gary and I went away for our anniversary. I was so ready to just get away by ourselves. I was hoping to wean Abby during this time away from her. I made all the plans for a get-away in a cabin by a lake. It was going to be a nice, romantic trip, but I also wanted to spend time with the Lord and ask Him what we were supposed to do about this house situation.

I was hoping that we would pray together and talk to each other and just enjoy the quiet and beauty of nature together. We haven’t been away from all of the kids for about 8 years now. We used to go away for our anniversary every year. Even then, we had a nursing baby with us many times.

As the time came nearer to leave, I started missing the kids. I hadn’t even left yet, but I was already missing them! I told them that I was going to have a hard time with this. The older kids said to go have fun and not worry about a thing. They had a new spaghetti recipe they were anxious to try – barbecue spaghetti with meatballs. They told me that they would watch the babies like hawks. I was really concerned about that part of the whole thing. Would they really watch my babies well enough?

We took off for the lake that night. Earlier in the day, Gary had been talking about just going ahead and signing the year lease on the house. That seemed to be all they cared about. We had just been trying to be honest, but that didn’t seem to be acceptable to them. We talked about things on the way to the lake. We were both relaxed and looking forward to our time together. I was a little bit nervous about the kids, but I knew they would be all right and God would take care of them.

We got to the cabin and tried to turn up the heat because it was really cold in there. The thermostat said it was 50 degrees. Gary tried to set it higher, but it was stuck on 45 degrees. It wouldn’t change no matter what he did to it. There was a gas-log fireplace, so he tried to turn that on. There was a little bit of a flame, but it wasn’t putting out any heat, and there was no way to turn that up, either.

I found an emergency number on the paper they left for us on the counter. It was late, so there was nobody in the office. I called the number four times, but we never got a call back.

We finally left to go back home. We were disappointed, but we were also kind of relieved to be going back to the kids. On the way home, we felt like the Lord was really telling us to go ahead and sign the year lease. We both felt a peace about it.

So the next day, we read the lease and signed it and copied it and took it to the office of the rental management group. A couple days later somebody came and took the sign out of our yard. (The first people who had wanted to rent the house must have backed out when they saw that we really weren’t going to leave until we had somewhere to go. So the rental management group had come out and put a sign in our yard again. I suppose they would have tried to let people go through our house again to look at it.) But now we don’t have to worry about any of that any more.

I am so relieved. I’m thankful that God has taken that pressure away from us. I don’t know what His plans are for when we are to move somewhere else or where we are to go, but I’m thankful that I don’t have a sign in my yard or people threatening to take us to court any more!

Previous to all of these events, Gary wrote a letter to the owners and explained to them that his job situation was more secure than he had thought and asked them to at least let us stay in the house through December. We never heard from them, but when the rental management group called to tell them we had signed the year lease, maybe his letter influenced them to go ahead and let us stay.

Moving somewhere else would have been such a hardship. It’s hard for us to find a house in this area because of occupancy rules. They won’t allow more than two people per bedroom. That means we would have to rent a 6-bedroom house. We haven’t even found a 6-bedroom house to look at! We would love to have 6 bedrooms, but there aren’t many houses around that have that many bedrooms- especially in our price range. We make 4 bedrooms work fine, but still it would be nice to have a couple more bedrooms.

And having had bad experiences with BOTH of the rental management groups that dominate our area, we wondered if we would be able to find a house to rent. We wouldn’t get any help from them.

But we are happy that God gave us wisdom for this situation. And we were happy to see our babies as soon as we woke up the next morning. We will still get our chance to have a get-away, but I guess it wasn’t time yet.

Some day we will have a big, beautiful house, and it will belong to us. And we will have land, too. And all of this will be behind us. We are holding on to that promise.

P.S. If you want to know more about our bad experiences with the rental management groups, I would be happy to share. Just leave a comment asking me to write a post about it.