Memorial Box Monday: A bed

God really blessed our family in several different ways this past week, and I'm so excited to tell you guys about how amazing our God really is!

Thursday morning I was leisurely sleeping in, when my only little boy, Jonathan, came knocking on my bedroom door to tell me that someone was here. I wasn't expecting anybody, so it got me up and running pretty quickly. Who should be at our door but the director of our foster care agency! Apparently she had been trying to call us all morning, but had been unable to get anyone on the phone. She went to all of that trouble just to let us know about a potential placement. During our discussion, she asked if I had enough beds, and I was like, yeah, sure! Of course I do. I went upstairs to spread the news, and Tink was like.. "Um.... no, mom, you don't!" And then I counted the number of beds. Oops!

Of course, I sprinted to my computer, frantic to see if I could find one locally for sale. It also had to fit into a rather strict budget. I went to Craig's List, and a listing had been posted nine minutes earlier for a really lovely daybed with a mattress for a rock bottom, way better than I had dared to hope, price. I immediately e-mailed the seller. I let her know that the bed would be for our new foster placement, and prayed that God would push the seller to choose us!

A couple of hours later, I got a call from the seller. She chose us to purchase the bed because she, too, was a foster parent. Wow. We went to pick it up, and she said "God Bless You" on the way out. There's not a doubt in my mind that God provided a bed for one of our three new little ones. I'll put a little toy bed in our memorial box as a symbol of how God provided something amazing in record breaking time.

Ah... so much more to tell...

Memorial Box Monday: The House

Yep, I've been gone. Tons happened. I'll try to tell it all, but today I want to focus on our biggest surprise blessing from the last several months.

My honey and I were in the kitchen talking one day in late January or early February. We were about to legally outgrow our house. Let me explain. Our rental house was great for us. It had 3 decent size bedrooms, a very large living area, a place for the kids to play, good yard space, and all of that in a safe neighborhood. It was a perfect, God-sized blessing for those two years. As you readers may know, we moved in the house with only two kids, and now we have 5. Jonathan, being the only boy, had a very small bedroom to himself. Tink, Indie, and Juli shared a room, and JP, Sassy, and myself shared another. Sassy could share the room with us until she turned 2, and then she needed to be in her own bedroom, but the "girls" room was already maxed out. We had two options. 1) We could rent a bigger house, or 2)We could convert the living space into the girls room/playroom. We were both a little frustrated with our options. We have been praying for years for a home to call our own, and we just didn't want to go through the process of renting again, and we weren't financially prepared to buy.

After despairing a bit about our prospects, we agreed that God could do anything, and we would begin to find another home for us, knowing that we probably would have to give up a safe neighborhood to account for size. I had been looking at a rental home online for several years. Yes, years. It had a lot of balconies, so I was a little concerned, but the listing said that the home had 3-5 bedrooms, so I was willing to take a look.

We went to view the home on a very, very snowy day in February. We found that it had been empty for around 2-4 years. I was shocked, people, because this house was .... big. 5 bedrooms in actuality. Two of them big enough to hold "legally" 3-4 kids. There's a huge multi-purpose room upstairs, a big kitchen and dining room, and the kicker --- a ginormous yard big enough for football games. It wasn't perfect. It needed lots of updates, most of which were cosmetic. The layout is a little odd in spots, and the living room is pretty small (which was a big concern for us because we minister to college and high school kids, and we need room to congregate). However, we both saw room to grow, and to add to our family. We were aware that there was a small chance of a rent-to-own option, so we talked to the realtor about it.

After weeks of paperwork and such, we finally sat down to have a conference call with the elderly gentleman who owned the home. We were praying, and praying, and praying that we might have a chance someday, by way of rent-to-own, of owning this home and filling it with the pitter patter of little (and not so little) feet.

Aren't you glad that God is so much bigger than us? That in his infinite wisdom, when his plans come to fruition, that we can only stand at gape at how much he really, really loves us?


That conference call took a very unexpected turn. The owner of the home did not want to enter into a rent-to-own contract, and he was not at all happy with the appraisal value of the home. My heart was just pounding in my chest, and I saw our dream of a huge family get flushed. We were having a lot of trouble understanding the gentleman on the phone, and finally the realtor told him we would discuss the situation and call him back.

We discussed and lost hope. The phone rang, and it was the owner of the home, calling back to make a slight clarification. He didn't mean he didn't want us to buy the home. He just wanted TO FINANCE IT FOR US! Yes, no lending company, no two years of waiting to see if we could qualify to buy the home. Just straight owner financing.

I'm still in shock that God, in his great mercy, did what we thought was absolutely impossible-- he gave us a home so that we can raise our family, bring orphans home, foster children, and open that home up to youth and college students. The scale of this blessing is just out of this world. It's supernatural. It is, and only can be, GOD!

We received a little notecard from the former owner of the home the other day, and that will go into my memorial box to symbolize how God gave us such a huge answer to a prayer.