My house is in the middle of upheaval right now. I suppose that has been true at various times in the thirty years we have lived in this place. Wow. It feels strange to think we’ve lived here that long–longer than I lived with my parents growing up.
I grew up in five different houses, but only two since we married. The first one was about the size we would like to downsize to someday, but it wasn’t quite what we’d hoped for to raise three boys. So we started house hunting. Have you ever been house hunting? Discouraging task, isn’t it? We literally got to the point of quitting when our then current house sold and this one became ours.
Side track here – things often go this way, don’t they? Even when we seek God’s will and best for our lives, we often wait until the point when we are sure we can’t handle it any more. So just stay put. Be content where you are, right? And then God opens a door wide and surprises us. Happened to me again when I sold my first book series.
So I have no doubt God will come through again, and He will give us what is absolutely best for us when His time is right. In the meantime…we are remodeling.
Actually, this house was in bad shape thirty years ago and it’s taken that long to get it to where we liked it. But now some of those things, like the 30-year-old kitchen need an upgrade again. So here we are doing the whole fix-it thing. And the painting thing. And the shopping for this and that thing.
All in hopes that we will sell faster when the time comes and that we will have time to enjoy the place until then. But please–next time, I don’t want to fix up anything! I’m really hoping that God has a move-in-perfect-for-us ready house somewhere someday. So far…I haven’t found anything that comes close.
But that’s okay, because I am learning something through all of these last minute lessons God is teaching me. And that is this:
I’m not very good at trust. I learned to worry and fear at a young age, and those things have been hard to break because the opposite of worry SHOULD be trust, but most of the time? It’s control.
We worry or fear so we try to control things so we won’t worry or fear, right? We want to feel good inside. And to let go of control is scary too, so we cling to what we think is working for us.
It’s not.
But we think it is.
And even though I’ve learned this lesson over and over again, God still has to remind me that there are levels of trust I haven’t reached yet. Right now I have to trust Him with some pretty tough things. And I have to trust Him with our future. That includes where we’re going to live in a few years.
But I’ve decided that this deeper trust is really a good thing. It means hands off. Do what I can. Leave the results to Him. You know what? He’s a lot better at results than I will ever be!
We’ve prayed over the minutest details of life and yes, we’ve even prayed over choices in this whole remodeling thing. But once we pray, we need to remind ourselves that God wants to answer our prayers. He loves it when we lean into Him and ask Him for grace to help where we fail. Like a child crawling onto her father’s lap, trusting him to take care of her, that’s what God wants of us as His dear children.
Don’t fret. Go ahead and fix what you can. Call an expert if you have to–like a plumber when the faucet won’t go in right or a painter if the job is too big. But leave the worry to Him. He can handle it. The future of our spiritual growth depends on how well we learn to trust.
Selah~
#livegrace #alwaystrust #godcanbetrusted #remodeling
