It’s a pretty icky feeling.

When you think you’re adding a hearty dash of season salt to your eggs and you learn the hard way that you actually added red pepper. With your mouth on fire and shock written all over your face you try to gracefully recover while trying to figure out WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!

When you go up a stairway in the dark and you think there’s one more step but instead find yourself trying to step on air, you walk away feeling a bit like an idiot and  you feel a bit betrayed by your instincts.

That’s how it feels when you try to sell your house on public auction and only one interested person shows up and refuses to bid against themselves. 🙂

After a series of events in our lives we felt sure God wanted us to sell our house. We didn’t know why exactly, but everything that happened in our lives seemed to point in that direction.

It was a decision we struggled with a bit because if we are staying in Lancaster County why wouldn’t we keep our house instead of renting? At the same time though there’s this thing we want to pursue and we felt it would be easier to pursue it if we let go of the financial responsibility of owning a house.

Well, we tried…

and we failed.

We feel…

angry?

confused?

betrayed?

Yes, to all of those.

Excited? Yes, We feel a bit excited because first of all we get to keep our house, we don’t have to pack up and move. 🙂 We also feel just a wee bit excited because God never let’s stuff like this happen unless he has a better plan.

Yes. All those emotions are directed at God.

When you seek his will and you try to live in the center of it, then he doesn’t show up when you need him…

Well, you wonder if you can ever trust him again?

I know, I know. God always shows up when we need him, but when he doesn’t let your house sell it sure doesn’t feel like he did.

Which leads us to wonder…

Did we get it wrong? Did he never want us to sell our house?

Or, did he want us to face this situation so we can learn from it?

We have come up with multiple ideas of why he let this happen, I have absolutely no idea if any of them are right tho.

Control. Do we still try to control our own lives and he is bringing us to a place of complete submission?

Fear of man. Does what people think still matter too much to us and he is bringing us to a place of complete freedom of that?

Trust. Is he bringing us to a place of trusting him even when we don’t know what that’s supposed to look like.

It also makes us wonder if we can ever trust ourselves again? Do we even have any idea what we are doing?!

I’m sure of one thing though. I’m very, very sure of this to be exact.

Prayer is incredibly powerful!!

I have seen prayer change people that I honestly thought would never change. I have seen things work out because of prayer that shouldn’t have.

Then there’s a more personal level…

If you pray for patience, you will find yourself in many situations where you need to practice patience.

If you pray for faith, you will find yourself in situations where the only way out is faith.

We pray daily that we would live in God’s will, that the choices we make would fall in line with what he wants. Why then, as soon as something doesn’t go the way we think it should, do we get all ‘bent out of shape’ and wonder what God is trying to do?

Maybe the simple conclusion is: “He is answering our prayers.”

We have dreams, BIG dreams, dreams that we believe are God inspired. Dreams that we can’t accomplish on our own, we need his help to get there.

Jeff Nolt (pastor at Threshold) had a sermon on this once. A couple things he said stood out to us.

If you believe there’s something God wants you to do, you can’t sit around waiting for it to just happen, because it won’t.  You’ve got to start taking steps in that direction. Oh, and you will fail. You’ll have moments when you are sure this is God’s plan but your ‘step of faith’ finds you flat on your face on the ground. That isn’t what matters tho, the only part that matters is that you get up, brush yourself off, learn from it and try again.

That’s not his exact words but it’s the point he was trying to make.

So, maybe that’s  where we are right now?

If God wants to use you in the highest places he will first prepare you by taking you through the lowest valleys.

Maybe he wants to use this to prepare our hearts for something?

I believe each person we meet, each situation that arises plays a part in taking us where God wants us.

What the devil wants to do to throw us off track, God can always turn around and use for our benefit and for his glory.

We can let hard situations derail us, or we can use them as stepping stones to a greater faith, greater trust and greater assurance that God knows the plans he has for us, plans to prosper us and not to harm us…