We’ve moved into our own home.

After hoping, praying, and waiting for eleven years, we own a home again.

Those are sweet words to say and for those who’ve known us through the waiting process, I hope they are sweet words to hear too.

Eleven years ago this past summer we lost a beautiful home in Temecula, California. The housing market had slumped and we weren’t the only people experiencing the pain of foreclosure. After the close of my business and the rise of our variable interest rate, we found it impossible to keep up with the payments. The day Julian and I faced this fact, it was like a weight was lifted from our shoulders. Still, hindsight is 20/20, as they say, and I would never advise anyone to walk away from their home. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have fought much harder to keep it.

I never, for even a moment, thought that it would take 6 moves, 5 rentals home which came with 5 very different landlords, and eleven years of patience before God would give us more than we could have imagined. In fact, I had a friend in Wisconsin, smarter than I wanted to admit at the time, that told me it could take ten years before we owned our own home again. I’m pretty sure I was secretly mad at her for a week. How dare she not have greater faith than that?!

Yet even after I’ve said all that I can’t help but ponder the journey. The eleven year journey in which God strengthened my marriage, our family and my faith. The journey that taught me so much about God’s faithfulness and my bend toward selfish, sinful manipulation of a God who, thankfully, will not be moved by such methods.

I think about all of the people He brought into my life because of our “gypsish” tendencies.

I am incredibly thankful for the journey. Incredibly.

On the day we were packing the moving truck with all of our worldly possessions or at least those that would fit, I told anyone who had ears to hear that this move was the beginning of a financial miracle.

$50,000 in debt with the IRS and another nearly $100,000 of debt from credit cards, child support and unsecured loans, a miracle was definitely needed. But the miracle that God gave us was so much more than financial. He brought me home from the work force and provided solely through Julian for the first time in our lives. He gave us the courage to teach our children at home until high school age which has given each of them such a solid foundation with which to face the world that hates the God we so love.

No, I wouldn’t advise anyone to walk away from their home. It’s a harder road than it seems. For us though, God used for good what at times felt like it might kill me.

And if this new home is any indicaton of what He has prepared for us in heaven, people… heaven is so gonna rock!