How God Moved When We Moved

Back in September Amy and I started talking again about what the odds were of moving back to Virginia. I told her that I would look for jobs in Roanoke, but ended up not finding anything. Amy had the genius idea of asking my employer if we could move to Virginia. My job as a consultant affords me the ability to work from home a lot and work at customer sites the rest of the time. I never really had an office except for my office at home. I asked my boss and, after checking with the higher ups, he approved my request! This is huge as there isn't a very strong IT job market in southwest Virginia. We listed our house in October and waited...

In the end of February, we received an offer on our home, but for about $12,000 less than we listed it. We wrestled with if we should take such a low offer. That blew away all of our equity. But we knew that we wouldn't get any better offers given the decline in comparable sales in our neighborhood. A few weeks earlier I had estimated our tax returns and closing costs and found that we would be broke, but not in the hole. We fought, thought, and prayed about it and finally... we felt peace. We countered and waited. Amy had been applying for part-time jobs for 7 months and hadn't heard a word back from anyone until a few weeks earlier. She had interviewed at one place a few times and it looked like she would actually get the job. She had continued with the interviews because we didn't know if the negotiations would fall through. We received a counter offer from the buyer while driving down the road, but it was still lower than we could take. About 15 minutes after that, the company called to offer Amy the job! Weird timing... Do we stay and wait for a better offer or do we take this one? We knew we needed to be honest with the company making the offer and told them how we had our house for sale and after little to no interest for 4 months, it looked like we would have a contract. The company thanked Amy for her honesty and rescinded the offer. We had nothing holding us back. After another counter offer from us, we came to an agreement with the buyer and we had a contract on our house!

But we're not out of the woods yet. Our house still had to appraise and given the comparable sales and foreclosures in our neighborhood, it wasn't going to be easy. We prayed like crazy that week. I asked everyone I knew to pray for us. The appraisal came and went and we never heard a word. Our realtor said that if we didn't hear anything, everything must've been ok. Next up was our home inspection. I was worried we'd have to spend $500 - $1,000 in repairs after hearing what typical inspections cost the sellers. The home inspector was so polite that he even removed a loose nail on our roof for free. He found only two things, which cost us about $40 to repair! Amazing...

We went to Virginia and started looking at places to rent. Amy found a nice house for rent in our price range, so we met the landlord and took a look. The landlord knew both of our parents and told us the place was ours if we wanted it. And he dropped $100 off of the rent! We gave him the security deposit and he gave us the key. He even let us repaint the house before moving in. While all this was going on, the buyer of our house wanted to move the closing up a week. Most closings get delayed for lending issues or other issues, but ours was going smoothly.

With just less than a week before our closing, we weren't sure if we had to pay our mortgage and rent. We still hadn't received all of our tax refunds and didn't have all of the money. Our realtor checked and thankfully we didn't have to pay our mortgage this last month. We received our finalized closing costs a few days before closing and were surprised since it was higher than we expected. Plain and simple -- we didn't have the money. But we trusted God and God provided. I asked the ladies at work processing expenses to expedite my expense check. They did everything they could and had the check out the door that same day. We asked our landlord if he could wait to cash our rent check until after we closed. Much to our surprise, he said that would be no problem at all. And finally, both of our parents offered to loan us the funds we needed. God opened the floodgates.

Our closing came and went perfectly. The buyer was very polite and the closing was smooth. We were broke, but we had sold our house!!! We found out that our house praised for exactly what we sold it for. That means it didn't really appraise for that value, but that the appraiser stretched it to make it work. Things couldn't have gone more smoothly. We never get a huge tax return and the year that we do is the one we needed it. We considered it a gift from God. Throughout this process, I learned that when your will and God's will line up, nothing will stop you. Nothing.