Trust Me

by ComputerBob

June 6, 2004

The past several days have been a whirlwind of joyful activity and miracles. After looking for a home to buy for the past 6 months, this past Wednesday night, my wife and I finally found and fell in love with a wonderful home that's on a closed loop, in a beautiful, quiet neighborhood that's right next to a 150-acre county park/wildlife preserve. It's less than 5 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, less than 5 minutes from my wife's sister and her husband's house, and it sits on land that is higher than the 500-year flood plain. We immediately made an offer on the house, and the next morning (Thursday), the owner accepted our offer. Thursday afternoon, we qualified for the mortgage and filled out all the paperwork. Friday morning, I found us some homeowner's insurance. By Friday afternoon, I had already completed everything that we needed to do before the closing date. We're going to close on it on June 21, only 18 days after our purchase offer was accepted. It is so perfect for us that it would've been our dream home no matter where it had been located, but it makes it even better that it's in a quiet neighborhood, next to a wildlife preserve. My wife and I truly can't think of anything we would change about this house or anywhere else we would rather spend our twilight years together.

There were many miracles that allowed us to buy this house: We had driven by and seen its "For Sale" sign a week ago Saturday, after my brother- and sister-in-law had mentioned that the county had announced that the nearby wildlife area was going to become a public park. But, when I called the selling realtor that same day, they told me that they had no listing for it. We learned later that the sign people had put up the "For Sale" sign 4 days too early. The house finally appeared in the MLS online home listings 4 days later, this past Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday morning, the seller already had a stack of full-price offers, and one over-full-price offer, all from people who hadn't even seen it yet. Due to the bungling of our realtor, we didn't even get to view the house until late Wednesday afternoon. My wife and I went to the home to view it, but our realtor never showed up. After waiting 15 minutes, I drove to a pay phone to call our realtor, while my wife stayed at the house, in case he showed up.

When I called our realtor, he told me that he hadn't even gotten around to calling to make our viewing appointment until 1:30 that same afternoon, and at that time, he had been told that the house was no longer for sale, and we wouldn't be allowed to view it, because the seller was planning to raise the price and then re-list it. He had left us 2 messages to that effect on our answering machine, but I hadn't gotten his messages because, before our house viewing, I had been at the county offices, discussing the proposed plans for the new park with its project manager. After I finished talking to our realtor, I drove back to the house, feeling pretty discouraged that we had lost our chance to buy it.

I was shocked by what I found out when I got back to the house. While I was gone, the seller's realtor had shown up, to add a "One-Year Warrantee" sign to the "For Sale" sign, underneath the "Shown By Appointment Only" sign. My wife had gotten out of her car to greet him, thinking that he was our realtor. When she explained to him that our realtor had never shown up for our scheduled viewing, he asked her if we'd like him to ask the owner (who was home) if she would be willing to let us see it anyway. My wife said, "Of course!" so he asked the owner and surprisingly, she agreed to let us go in and look. So when I got back from calling our realtor, the seller's realtor was all ready to show us the home.

It was exactly what we had been looking for for the past 6 months, and within 30 seconds, we both knew that we wanted to buy it. Since she was there, we were able to talk to the owner (Pat) for awhile, and we all got along great. When we left, we told her, "Pat, we're going to the realtor's office to write up an offer for you." Pat replied, "I hope you get it!" We immediately drove to the realtor's office and wrote up our offer, which she accepted the next morning, knowing that it was from us. There were an incredible number of "coincidences" and "mistakes" along the way, like our realtor bungling our viewing appointment, but the sum total of all of them was that we were able to buy our dream home, even after it appeared as though we had arrived way too late in the process to even be allowed to view it.

In fact, if any of the many things that went wrong this past week had not gone wrong, someone else would have already bought our dream home several hours before we even arrived to view it.

Friday afternoon, I brought Pat 2 dozen roses in a vase. She and I visited for another 3 1/2 hours, and she introduced me to some of our new neighbors. Along with the roses, I gave her a Thank You card that had a picture of a watering can and some flowers on its front. When she opened my card, Pat told me, with a tear in her eye, that her late husband had always called her a pet name that referred to the fact that she always carried a watering can around the house. Pat is a very sweet woman who has no family any more. She is moving to a very nice retirement home about 15 minutes south. I told her that she is in our family now, and that we'll just figure that she "comes with the house." I'll be more than happy to go visit Pat in her new home, and bring her back to our home to see her old neighbors, pick magnolias from the tree in our back yard, visit the nearby park, etc.

If my wife and I ever had any doubts that we were really supposed to move to Florida, or that God really does love us and will take care of us, the miracles of this past week have erased those doubts forever.

On Friday morning, I ran around and did a bunch of errands, like dropping off a copy of our latest bank statements at the mortgage company. As I walked down the hall to leave our mobile home, I noticed Mini and Max both following me, acting worried in their cute, "Are we ever going to see you again?" way. I spoke to them, saying, "Don't worry. I'll be back in a little while. I'm going out to make arrangements for our new house. Trust me. You're just gonna love it." As I spoke those words to my two worried dogs, I suddenly realized that God often tries to tell me those same things, and that I usually understand God's plans for me about as well as Mini and Max understand my plans for them, but the most important thing in both cases is those two words, "Trust me."

A few hours later, on Friday afternoon, when I was driving to Pat's house to take her the roses, there was a car directly in front of me that was going only 25 miles per hour in a 35 mile-per-hour zone. At first I felt frustrated, and I consciously wondered why the person in front of me was "blocking me" from getting to Pat's house. Then, I remembered how God had used all of the things that had gone wrong this past week to enable us buy our dream home. Suddenly, I imagined that God might be using the slow driver in front of me to delay me long enough to prevent me from being hurt or killed in an accident somewhere up the road or later in the day. Whether or not that's what was actually happening, I'll never know, but now I know for sure that God sometimes uses bunglers, frustrations, and seemingly missed opportunities to show us that we can trust Him.