Another day with no offers on the house. Another day of feedback from buyers who aren’t
interested. Another day of deeply
wanting to stay in Cincinnati, of ambivalence towards the community I am
supposed to be joining. The fact is that
I don’t want to go. There are no
neighborhoods that I love and can afford.
There is so much I’m leaving behind, and the fact that our house won’t
budge at the price point we need is not exactly encouraging either. In Cincinnati, we live in a neighborhood we
could never afford anywhere else, and we live here because we bought a short
sale when no one else can buy. We were
brave. We likely can’t do that again,
especially not with three kids who would be living in the construction
zone. The peace I woke up with has
quickly eroded to an ugly mess of fear, hurt, and anger. I’m furious that no one wants to buy my house
because I don’t want to sell it. There.
Our church is doing an all-church journey called “Brave”…appropriate,
don’t you think? I started with the same
heading I used last year because frankly, I haven’t found a way to make it
happen yet: “Make wise decisions as I find a way to make a living as a writer
and stay at home with my kids.” I’ve
taken some Brave strides in the past year; I’ve found increasing amounts of
freelance work, seen my product published, and gained confidence in what I can
do…but my kids are still in daycare while I teach eight hours a day. If we stay here, we still can’t afford for me
to quit. So I set the wheels in motion,
but nothing has come to fruition. As I
worked through my individual work tonight (before my phone battery died), I
felt like last year’s heading was all wrong for me. After all, I’m stuck being brave in the
selling our house/moving to God-knows-where mess regardless. I felt like my Brave step needed to be
something both easier and harder, something much more difficult to quantify,
something much harder to act upon. I’ve
watched my emotions over the last two days as I received negative feedback in
text after text, and I am wrecked. I
lash out in every direction with every piece of bad news. My inner turmoil, my quickness to tears…it
all points to one thing: I do not really believe God answers prayer. I do not believe He truly wants to care for
me. I do not really believe I can trust
Him. I do not believe that He will move
unless I work my tail off and get everything right for Him. I believe I don’t see answered prayers
because I do not work hard enough. I
really, truly believe that I do not qualify for answered prayers, for miracles,
for evidence of His hand at work. Other
people get to see the big stuff, not me.
How disrespectful to God, and how very human.
And so my Brave journey needs to be one of trust. There are so many prayers I do not pray
because I don’t think God will answer them, and I don’t want to be
disappointed. I pray safe things, things
that I think might actually happen, things I can bring about myself…but my
heart aches with years of unanswered prayers, of prayers that were only
answered years after the fact. I am
afraid to trust my instincts; I must not know what to pray for because God
doesn’t show up very often. Obviously
this is completely antithetical to what God tells us about Himself, and it
absolutely comes from a place of fear, hurt, and mistrust.
So on this Brave journey, I’m going to lean in to God. I’m going to explore what it means to pray
boldly in faith. I’m going to seek God’s
wisdom in my prayer life and start asking for – and expecting – big things. I’m going to pursue God and I’m going let Him
heal my mistrusting heart. Failure to
trust means holding on to control…I’m going to beg Him to let me feel safe in
letting go.
So we still don’t have a buyer or a house we like in North
Carolina, but I do have a heading for my Brave journey. That’s something, right?
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