Last night before I went to bed I was reading a talk by President Monson from this past GC, and a particular statement stood out to me: “The Lord is in the details of our lives.” It doesn’t always feel like that, or maybe I just forget that. I tend to have the Job complex, as I like to call it. I feel like the only way for me to make it back to Heavenly Father is to suffer one trial after another without having time to breathe before moving from one adversity to the next. Maybe I’ve heard too many talks about adversity being good for the soul that I now think the only thing that’s good for the soul is a nice lengthy, bone-crunching trial. Of course my life has not played out like that, though I’ve had some hard times like all the rest of humanity, but nothing Job-like. However, I forget that as much as the Lord wants to test and try and build us up, He also wants to bless and help us. He doesn’t want us to ALWAYS be suffering, and as members of the church I think we almost expect everything to be hard. Sometimes I don’t pray about something because I assume that if I want it then it must not be in accordance with the Lord’s will. I take that scripture that “there must be opposition in all things” quite literally. And I don’t do this in a negative way, like I’m waiting for the worst to happen, but I’m just prepared for Him to say no or not yet because I figure that’s what’s good for me. But I almost never expect Him to say yes, and I think that sometimes I should hope for a yes.
My mother pointed out a scripture to me today:
“Or what man is there of you, who, if his son ask bread, will give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” (3 Nephi 14:9-11)
Sometimes He says no or not yet, but sometimes He might say yes, and I am learning this. Growth comes from prosperity too, not just poverty.
On Sunday a member of the Seventy spoke at our stake conference, and he shared a story about the Lord wanting to help us. A sister had finished teaching her lesson in YW’s and was putting her things away when her little 3-year-old wandered off. She didn’t even notice he was gone until someone brought him to her crying because his fingers had been smashed in one of the heavy wooden doors. Apparently, when they tried to open the door to get his hand out, it smashed his little fingers more, and closing it somehow did the same thing. Well, a brother from a different ward in the building pulled out a screw driver from his suit pocket and was able to wedge it in the crack and get the little boy’s hand out. What was amazing was that the man who helped was getting ready for church and had the strange but clear thought to put a screw driver in his pocket and take it to church with him. He didn’t know why, he just knew that he should and he did. He didn’t know the little boy, and he had never before in his entire life taken a screw driver to church.
I took home with me the assurance that God has a plan, that He wants to help us, and that He knows what is best for us. He is truly in the details of our lives. As surely as he can inspire a random stranger to bring a screw driver to church to help free a little boy’s fingers from a heavy door, He can work out the details of our lives as well. He knows what’s coming, and He has a plan to help us. Our Job complex might cause us to think that if we were in that situation that the Lord would allow our fingers to fall off so that we could go through the refiner’s fire, but it doesn’t always have to be like that. I’m grateful for lessons that seem to be taught at just the right moments my heart is most ready to learn them.
All of these thoughts lead up to the fact that we sold our house and we are moving next week. Why are we moving? Because the Lord is in the details of our lives.
The last time I posted, we had decided to take our home off the market. We had considered selling, but after weighing the pros and cons, we knew that it would only be worth it to sell if we could get more than our house is worth. Otherwise we’d be losing our $512 house payment while Jacob is going to school and increasing our monthly expenses. So we prayed about it and went back and forth, and I kept feeling nervous about it being on the market, so Jacob and I decided to take it off. I told Juddy to go ahead and unlist it (he’s our realtor), but then I felt nervous about that too. I am such an over-thinker when it comes to making important decisions, and I often have a hard time knowing what the Lord is telling me to do because I’m so worried about making the wrong decision. However, I am a firm believer that the Lord will not allow you to make the wrong choice when you are trying so prayerfully to make the right one. I’ve heard that sometimes you have to make a decision and move forward with it to know if it’s the right one, so I try to do that when I don’t really get a yes-or-no answer to prayers. So that’s what we did. Juddy didn’t take it off the MLS right away, so realtors kept calling me to show it to their clients, and I’d just tell them that we were taking it off the market.
Several days passed, and we were still getting calls. I had had the thought a couple times that it would be worth it to sell if we could get more money than we anticipated, but I knew that wouldn’t happen. After still getting calls, I called Juddy and asked him if he had taken the house off yet, but he said he kept forgetting so he hadn’t. That’s okay, he’s my bro-in-law and being our realtor for free. So he was going to do it the next morning. Well, he checked his email that night and texted me with an offer. A realtor had emailed him with a client’s cash offer and a letter from the bank verifying the funds in his account. The offer was almost 10% more than our house would appraise for, but he said he didn’t want an appraisal since he was paying cash. We had listed our house ridiculously high, and he offered us that. Juddy had even said, “I never thought in a million years that you would ever get an offer for that amount.” And we did. And we were giddy. So we accepted it. The clients had never even been to my house. They saw two pictures of it online and bought it based on that. They came the next day from Oregon after we accepted their offer to make sure they wanted it, and they looked through it and wanted it.
It may seem to some like a coincidence that we got a buyer to pay cash for our house for more than it’s actually worth. There are bigger houses in our neighborhood close to our asking price that they could have gotten, especially being cash buyers.
And to tell you the truth, I don’t think I even prayed for this to happen because it seemed too far fetched, but the Lord must have heard the longings of my heart and answered despite my unwillingness to ask.
It is also important to note that nobody really knows how much of a struggle it has been financially for Jacob and I since we have been married. He was fresh off his mission (he was 25, he went out late) without a college degree or established career when he came to my rescue and took on my wounded heart and two little boys. It is no joke when I say that we live off love and high hopes because we certainly don’t live off money. And since he’s still in school, we don’t anticipate an increase in salary anytime soon (although I now know to ask anyway). Each year we make enough to cover our bills but gas and groceries get put on the credit cards and paid off with our tax return. That’s what we’ve done since we’ve been married. Now, it might sound terrible to some, but I’ve had money and a bad marriage before, and I would have traded that to live in a shack with a man who loved me. I guess I did trade that 
It is no coincidence that any of this happened, and I’m convinced that my brother-in-law left my house on the market because he was supposed to. Because the Lord is in the details of not just everyone else’s life but my life too. And it’s okay to ask for good things and get the good things we ask for.
How’s that for a good story? Miracle of the Year right here in my very own little life.
Oh, and our house closes on Tuesday (5 days) and ask me if I’ve packed a single box. Don’t ask me.
1 comment:
Hello my sister, I just wanted to tell you that I absolutely love reading your blog. You are a phenominal writer and your testimony blows me away and strenghtens my own all at the same time. I just love you girlie! You are Super Girl!:) That story about the man and the screw driver made me bawl. What an amazing thing! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I love reading them!:)
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