Diosidence

Highlights from April

As promised, here’s the next installment of our recent adventures.

The last we posted, we had not yet listed the house but were continuing to work on home projects and ongoing SWR related business in hopes of relocating at some point during the summer.  As for the house, our goal was to have it on the market by end of April in order to meet the prime selling season.  However, on a day trip to Round Top, Texas in early April, CJ was discussing the sale of the house with our friend, Kennette, and she mentioned how much she loved the community.  By the end of their girl’s day, she let CJ know that she would be very interested in looking at the house despite the fact that we still had 101 projects to complete.  When she came by for the walk through, Kennette was amazed by the fact that the floor plan was the exact floor plan of a home that she lived in when her daughter, Bentlee, was small.  What a surreal “Diosidence” (a term coined by our Spanish speaking friends in the Dominican Republic referring to a Godly non-coincidence).  Needless to say, she fell in love with it immediately!  This was a dream come true…and yes, our God is really THAT good!  But here’s the rest of the story…..

In preliminary conversations around the sale price, we discovered that what our friend was hoping to pay was a good bit less than what we expected to list the house for.  However, we also learned that she would not be retaining a realtor (the seller typically pays for the buyer realtor’s commission) so that difference certainly helped fill the gap.  After much prayer and deliberation, I was still unsure as to what we should do given what I expected we would need in order to relocate.  Then CJ made a comment that made me see things in a completely new way.  She mentioned what a blessing our home had been to her and our daughter, Alli, when she was a single mom. She also shared that she would love for our home to be a blessing to another single mom and her daughter. I sensed that was a sign that God was leading us to sell our house to our friend.

We looked at the numbers and figured that we could sell the house at a price very close to our friend’s pre-approved amount. We figured that since she wasn’t going to use a realtor that we could save at least 3 percent, and transfer that savings to our friend by reducing our asking price. We discussed this proposal with our realtor, and he agreed as long as we did all the negotiating without him, to avoid a conflict of interest. Our realtor just handled the paper processing that would be required of the buyer’s realtor. Once our friend and we agreed to a price, we met with our realtor to sign the contract. God’s hands were all over each step of this process. We are so thankful that he worked it out that we did not have to go through the difficulty in keeping the house show ready with five animals living in it while showing it.

We were able to set the closing June 1^st; however, that would have left us very little time to find a house in Salida.  Our friend said that she couldn’t get out of her current lease until July 1^st, so we worked it into the contract that we would lease the house back to her for the month of June. This was clearly another Diosidence! It worked out that we would have two months to find a house in Colorado, and that our friend would have income to cover her mortgage for the month she wouldn’t be in the house. GOD is Great!

In between doing all the house stuff, I was able to expand the SWR website to make it more like an actual website not just a blog. The site now includes the following pages: Home; About Us (Mission, Statement of Faith, History, and Board of Directors); Adventures; Recent Posts; Contact Us; and Donate. CJ was also able to help me finalize the content that was uploaded to the website. Most of the pages are now self-explanatory, but the Adventures page may not be as clear. The Adventures page describes the various types of trips that SWR will offer, the possible trip duration, and the level of SWR involvement in a particular trip. So if you get a chance, check out the site. We would love to get your feedback on the site.

So, that’s our April adventures following God’s path.