Nancy and I have moved 18 times and have bought 10 houses in the process. We could be considered unstable, I suppose ?. Business related moves, family expansion and then reduction as well as the specific direction of God have taken us from here to there over 48 years of marriage. We are living in our dream home and our retirement home, we think! They have all been dream homes in their season. We moved for the final time two houses ago, or so we thought. God laughs at our plans ?.
Each home has a story about how God worked a miracle to get us into the exactly right spot at exactly the right time and/or stories of God’s work of grace. Sometimes the miracles of God happen in ways that get disguised as “coincidences,” but coincidences that happen regularly and with frequency soon become obvious designs of God. We have come to call them “God-incidences.”
We married in 1969 in the summer between our junior and senior years in college and moved into a low rent apartment in an old section of town just across the street from a railroad track. The flyer (train) came through every morning at 4am without fail, but we soon ceased to hear it. It was a great starting place furnished with the landlord’s castoffs which (except for the mattress) we were glad to have. We owned a roll top desk and not much else. The apartment was clean and safe and we were fortunate to get it, especially since we had no visible means of support.
The older couple who owned it took a chance on us when few others would. We were a couple of penniless college students with five part-time jobs between us. Having a place of our own where we could be alone together, no matter how lowly the place, was like Heaven to us. It reminded us of a simple stable with a manger that was provided just when it was need the most. Miracle number 1 was insignificant but necessary and very appreciated. Someone took a chance of us.
After we both graduated and found good jobs, we moved into a new apartment complex and bought a new car, a big TV and anything else we wanted. We purchased all new furniture on the “90 days same as cash” plan. We were making money hand over fist, but the more we bought the more we felt empty. In that place we began to have everything we ever wanted except happiness.
We did not know the Lord in a personal way. To us He was more of a concept or an idea than a person. Then circumstances turned against us. We lost our income and eventually almost everything we owned, but in that crucible, we found the Lord and that elusive happiness that we had sought for so long.
This was the place given us by God where He met us at our lowest and neediest point spiritually. It became the foundation stone of all of our future happiness. It was where we found our God and eternal life. Miracle number 2 was significant and very necessary. It changed our lives forever.
In June of 1971, I was in a major car wreck, broke my jaw, knocked out most of my front teeth and we moved into our pastor’s basement. They had four children and one on the way. They made very little money but they had a great heart for God. She had polio and an indomitable spirit. They were really great parents to their children. We learned more about marriage and parenting watching them than by any and all other methods available to us. It was there that the foundation for our 48 years of marriage was laid. Miracle number 3 was expensive but priceless.
Once we were back on our feet, we moved into a mid-priced one bedroom apartment while we tried to recover financially. Shortly after we moved in, Nancy found out she was pregnant with twins. They were born at only 8 months and were undersized and fragile. The doctors told us Todd (3 lbs 14 ounces) was going to die and although he spent 30+ days in one of the country’s first neo-natal ICUs, he survived and flourished.
We had no health insurance at the time of their conception, but the company I was working for decided to cover them fully even though they were a pre-existing condition. It was an expensive decision for them (low six figures). For us, it was Miracle number 4.
As soon as we realized our one bedroom apartment was too small for four people, we began to look for bigger housing. A settlement from the aforementioned car wreck, provided us a down payment for a small house. The best we could find for our money was way out in the far suburbs in an “iffy” neighborhood, but we felt we had no choice, so we “settled” for it and placed a contract on an 800-sf ranch-style home.
The next morning Nancy saw an ad in the local paper for just what we were wanting to begin with and in the perfect location. (The first house was miles from anyone we knew. This house was within walking distance from my mom who could not drive and proved to be invaluable in helping my young wife with twins. We could not have gotten through the first year intact without mom’s almost daily assistance.) Nancy called our realtor (her mother as it happened) who explained binding contracts to her. However, Nancy believed God wanted us in that area, so she persuaded her mother to see if anything could be worked out.
Nancy’s mother, who was already concerned about our new overtly enthusiastic, Protestant religious convictions (our families were all committed Catholics), was unsure how to convey “the will of the Lord” to her colleague, but she agreed to call him anyway. She called Nancy back stunned. The realtor who had received our contractual offer had “partied” a little too much the night before and failed to turn it in on time. We were free to look at the house in the paper. (Miracle number 5?)
As soon as Nancy pulled up in front of the house, she knew it was where God wanted us. After touring it for all of 10 minutes, she agreed that we would buy it, but asked the owner (a Mrs. Clark, as it happened)to allow me to come see it after work before the offer was final. Mrs. Clark agreed. That very afternoon, Mrs. Clark got another offer for more money, but she kept her word and held the house for my inspection. (Miracle number 6). We bought it. It was in that house that we first began to teach Bible studies.
Within two years, the house became too small, so we started looking for a bigger, but inexpensive, ‘fixer upper’ to accommodate our growing family. We bought a 50-year-old house in an older neighborhood made up largely of retirees. The house needed a lot of work and we were tapped out, but we thought we could endure it, because it had good bones and was ultimately large enough.
The house was bought from an estate, so our realtor (my smart mother-in-law again) put a $59 insurance binder on it in case the estate had not done so. A month before we were to move in, the tornado of 1974 that swept through Kentucky and Ohio hit the house.
Perhaps the worst room in the house was the kitchen which had nothing in it but a porcelain sink with a cloth skirt hanging down and one set of very ugly horseshoe-shaped cabinets above the sink. Apparently, God did not like the kitchen either, because the tornado picked up our chimney, threw it through the kitchen roof, knocked the cabinet off the wall and smashed the porcelain sink. Greg Maddox could not have thrown a better pitch. There was no other damage to our house but hundreds of homes around us were badly mangled.
The resulting check allowed us to remodel the kitchen, rewire the house, put on storm windows and re-pipe the house from the street to the basement providing water pressure unseen over the last 3 decades. Miracle number 7 was a doozy!
The storm had so altered the landscape that the older people moved out and “yuppies” moved in, remodeling the neighborhood as they came. The area suddenly “caught a bullet” and housing prices skyrocketed. Several years and several family additions later we sold for over twice the original purchase price and moved into a very nice home in a much nicer part of town.
It was here over a five-year period that I realized my lifelong dream of becoming a fulltime ordained pastor. Since I had long given up on that dream, I consider this as Miracle number 8 for me. This house and the experiences associated with it allowed me to become the teacher and minister that I have become. It proved to be a special and fruitful time of study and revelation in my life.
In 1980, Louisville, Kentucky, our home town, was recognized by the Wall Street Journal with the dubious distinction as being the “Number One City in America for Unauthorized Work Stoppages” in the decade of the 1970’s. Translation: there were more unionized strikes in Louisville than any other place during that time.
Our manufacturing industry fled the city and unemployment in the early 80’s reached 25%. The town was crushed under the weight of economic collapse. This was the era of the “Megatrends” phenomenon whereby employment opportunity fled the rustbelt North and Northeast sections of the country and boomed in the South and Southwest. A mass exodus ensued.
Our church of 700 people was hit hard by the economics of the day. We experienced over 25% unemployment and many more of us were very under-employed. Our support systems were fairly significant but insufficient to help everyone fully. Southern and Southwestern cities like Mobile, Alabama and Dallas, Texas were clamoring for qualified workers, so we sent dozens of resumes to our churches in those areas resulting in multiple job interviews followed by multiple job offers. Fifty-four families from our church ultimately moved to the Sunbelt. The first family to relocate was the Clark Family. That would be the six of us plus a single girl we had “adopted.”
Housing costs were about triple in Dallas/Fort Worth compared to Louisville’s prices. We moved into a smaller, newly constructed three-bedroom ranch for $800 per month (3 times more than we had ever paid before). The builder was offering liberal terms to our many families moving down. He allowed us to rent this new home until our five-bedroom, two story sold in Louisville. That took 11 months and felt like 11 years.
During that time it became apparent that we did not fit into the new Dallas home very well, but we were trapped, we thought. Then some friends came to visit us in preparation for moving down and fell in love with the house. The builder agreed to let them take over our contract and suddenly our house in Louisville (remember 25% unemployment) sold for the asking price (Miracle number 9).
We bought a larger two story just three doors down the street and the relocation was accomplished without a truck. A team of people looking like an army of ants literally picked up our goods from one house and walked it three doors down in a morning’s time. We traded in our $800 per month payment for a $1200 per month payment, and as you probably have guessed, that was more, a lot more. We were now paying five times more than we had ever paid in Louisville and 1/3 of our take home pay went to housing.
Somehow or another we managed to make the payment for a year. This was one of the many times in our walk with God that our income was less than our outgo but somehow God stretched our money to meet expenditures without putting us into debt. We have always attributed this to the transcendent economy of God for those who tithe. In any case, it worked and we consider it housing Miracle number 10.
After a year, I was feeling a lot of pressure to change jobs, but I dared not as long as I had such a huge house payment. Growing into the Texas economy would take some time. For all of us who moved from Kentucky. Then another church member moved to Dallas who wanted to build a large home nearby. He admired our home so I offered to rent it to him for a year for the $1200 monthly while he built his dream house.
This family moved in and we found a four-bedroom ranch for $700 per month and took a significant load off of our financial situation. We were very grateful for Miracle number 11, a renter willing to pay so much for a house so we could get a break. One year later, we moved back into the $1200 house after our finances had improved. Then I got transferred to San Antonio.
I was commuting twice a week from Dallas to San Antonio. We needed to sell the big house, but we were competing with a building boom and with a local builder offering sweetheart deals. We needed to get our family to San Antonio in the worst sort of way.
Our older children were entering high school. Jeremy was entering middle school and Benjamin was starting kindergarten. I was living half the week out of a suitcase in a hotel room. The housing market for re-sales was dead and deader. We needed another miracle! Ding Dong!
A realtor knocked on our door saying he was working with a client who was in the car with him and was on his way to the airport so he could fly back to Bahrain (which was apparently somewhere in the Middle East). Could he see the house without an appointment? It was cleaning day. (It is always cleaning day with kids that age.)
Nancy was babysitting another boy Ben’s age and they were both famous for peeing in the bushes at will. Stuff was everywhere, but… Sure, why not. What was there to lose? You guessed it. He bought the house. Can I chalk up Miracle number 12 here?
Just before school started, we bought a 4-bedroom home in San Antonio on a half-acre of ground and stayed there for 7 years, which is our longest tenure anywhere. The three older kids went to high school and then off to Texas A&M. It was the most significant career move of our lives and resulted in everything career-wise that has since transpired, – and this in spite of the fact that the new president of my company tried for three years to get me fired. It was a time of many significant interventions by God to restore our financial fortunes and lay both business and spiritual foundations for our future, but we will just aggregate them all under the heading Miracle number 13.
In early 1993, I followed my business mentor to a company based in San Diego, but my first job was to move the company to Atlanta, Georgia. It was a startup with no projected profit until May of 1994, but somehow I was able to persuade a company to lease us office space for the relocation. One Saturday morning in March, Nancy and I caught a plane from San Antonio bound for Atlanta and a planned 4-day house hunting trip, but we never made it to Hartsfield. No one did.
The worst blizzard on record closed the Atlanta airport for only the second time in its history and we spent the weekend in Dallas with friends. On Monday, we boarded an airplane for the newly reopened Atlanta airport to meet our realtor for a much-shortened two-day house hunting trip.
The airport was opened, but nothing else was. For two days, we slogged through the snow looking at houses full of people, adults and children, as well as their pets and marooned out-of-town relatives. Probably one out of four that we saw had trees sticking through the roof and other structural damage. People were begging us to ignore that pine in the living room. “It usually looks much nicer than this,” they assured us.
Little children without TV saw us as entertainment and often begged us to please buy their house because “Daddy was in trouble at work and they really needed to move!” The kids apparently had forgotten their pig Latin, but we knew what the parents were telling their children, “Amscray!” and “Utshup!”
Oddly enough after only two days we bought a house on a hill with a snow-covered 45-degree angled driveway and a naked boy taking a bath in a tub. He was not thrilled ?. (In order to keep straight the many houses we were seeing, we gave them code names. This one was “the naked boy in the bathtub” house.) Turned out to be a great house, and because it was located in Spring Ridge in Roswell, we wound up at Mt. Pisgah United Methodist Church. Had we bought any other house we saw, we would not have ever come to Mt. Pisgah. We will call that Miracle number 14 even if it only falls in the category of significant divine direction, probably the most significant direction we have received in the last 20 years.
In 1999 after our third company with the same management team, we found ourselves wanting to go to Wilmore, Kentucky to attend Asbury Theological Seminary. Our son, Benjamin had gone to be with the Lord and we were empty-nested. Our path was open and our calling was clear.
We went to visit friends in Carmel, California partially to get a respite for the emotional storm surrounding the passing of Benjamin and partially to seek God about the future. While we were there we got a call from our realtor. Our house had only been on the market a short while, but we had a full price offer from a well-qualified buyer. However, they needed to take possession in less than three weeks. Talk about fast forward!
We flew immediately back to Atlanta, drove to Wilmore and discovered that there were no good rental options. Someone told us about a new neighborhood and we drove through it hoping to find a rental house. Instead we saw a nice home for sale that “spoke to us.” We knocked on the front door and bought it on the spot.
It turns out the owner was a youth pastor at the church we would attend. He had just been transferred. He was all but packed and about to go on a mission trip before he relocated. The house could be available almost immediately. Three weeks later we had moved in and I was in summer school. We will definitely call all of that Miracle number 15. When we finished at Asbury two years later, we sold the house for full price within the same church without ever listing it.
In 2001 we moved from Wilmore to Flowery Branch, Georgia and bought a 3-year-old home that we determined to be our final retirement home. It was a great home, a split three-bedroom ranch that fit us to a tee. While we were there we tried unsuccessfully to start several churches and then took on the church from Hell. It was a time of significant dealing in my life and frankly, it was good to have a comfortable home in which to lick my wounds.
While we lived there I was treated for both prostate and thyroid cancer. Eventually I went back to work with my old management team three days per week and served as the unofficial, unpaid associate pastor at a local Methodist Church. It was a time in which God met us with a significant number of successes and also of failures that produced in us both strength and perspective that has proven to be invaluable in our lives. Our Flowery Branch home served us as a significant refuge from the storm, and we loved living there.
In 2005, the local Methodist Church changed pastors and that meant the end of our term of service there. Since most of what remained of our activities centered by that time in Alpharetta (over an hour away by car), we decided to leave our “final and retirement” home to get closer to what God had us doing. I had been driving 1.5 hours each way three days each week and gas was breaking the $3 per gallon mark. (Remember when that seemed high?)
We debated town homes (me) versus a home with a yard (she), so our realtor, Susan Craig, showed us virtually every home for sale from McFarland to Rucker Road from $150,000 to $250,000. She had nothing else to do I am sure ?. Then to throw me a bone we also looked at all the condo’s in the area. Ultimately God (and Nancy) said “yard,” so we bought our ninth house and relocated (for the 16th time) to Water’s Landing subdivision off Waters Road.
It was three miles from work, three miles from church and three miles from the golf course. Echoing George Clooney from “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” it was a geographical oddity. It was three miles from everywhere! ?. It proved to be another great place to live and from which to do the things that God gave us to do.
Five years later (that was 2011), Nancy had had enough of yard work. Then our realtor informed us that our condo of choice (the Orchards at Jones Bridge) had become very affordable. This time I felt that God wanted us to make the move, but God was going to have to tell Nancy the same thing. We have a rule that has stood the test of almost 50 years of marriage that unless God specifically informs BOTH of us concerning the decision and/or the amount. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we both get the same message or amount at once, but when that does not occur we wait until we do.
Seven years earlier, I had thought we should move into the Orchards, but Nancy (and God) did not agree, so we moved to Waters Landing. This time, seven years later, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was time to move to the Orchards, but Nancy’s thinking was, “NO and Heaven’s no!” or something to that effect. All of her initial responses were opposed to the move. “I feel like I would be living on a cruise ship!” were her exact words ?.
Miracle number 16 is that when I gave it to the Lord, He changed her heart in short order. She went from total opposition to thinking of it as the best possible place for us, and I did not persuade her. God did. Ask her, she will tell you it is so. The main reason why it turned around is because she prayed honestly about it. God showed her all the previous miracles surrounding our houses, and this allowed her to see it from God’s eyes.
Miracle number 17 includes the very interesting process of selling the Sailmaker house in a buyer’s market. It has had more twists and turns than a colonoscopy but has not been nearly as enjoyable ?. But God is a miracle worker as we have so often found out.
Today’s world is requiring more and more an active faith in God’s goodness, and a sincere belief in miracles. Nowhere is that more true in our lives than in fighting cancer, finding jobs and selling homes. But we have a big God and He can do anything.
We need to trust Him in all things and we must believe that God is good all the time, even when we need real estate assistance. One way to stir our faith in this area is to look back at all the times God has met us in the past when we thought it was just too big for even God to handle. It helps to make a list or keep a journal of God’s grace and faithfulness.
It may not be houses for everyone. Few people have moved and bought and sold as many times as have we, I am sure. But if we look carefully at the events of our lives that got us here, we will be able to see God’s miracles at work even in those days before we officially knew him. God loved us before we loved him and Jesus died for us while we were yet His enemies. Stir up your faith going forward by looking at God’s miracles in your lives in the past.
Heb 11:6-7And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. NASB
1 John 4:19 We love, because He first loved us. NASB
Rom 5:10For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. NASB*