Get some caffeine for this one. It's long!

I'm going to attempt to tell you the story about how we got our house without crying...which is hard since I've been crying about it for the past month now. Here it goes.

We had moved out the second weekend in August to my parent's house so we could then take our profits we were due to recieve on August 25th and find something else. You see, no one wants to deal with contingencies. You REALLY need cash in hand and squeaky credit. Two weeks after we had accepted an offer we were on the hunt for property. Most of the places we went to look at were ROUGH. Rough in the sense that we couldn't live in the house until major things were fixed. Either that or it was on a cliff, had a horrible driveway that we couldn't fit the 5th wheel down or was too far out of town. There was a property that we'd seen online, but they wanted too much money. The day our house was to close I checked out the internet and saw that same house for $30,000 less. It was still too much money, but Chris and I decided to stop by that weekend and just look at it. There wasn't anyone living in it so we were going to snoop a little. Low and behold when we showed up the back door was unlocked. We snuck inside and fell in love with it's potential. The land was nice and flat. It was fenced. There were 2 little barns and a chicken coop. It was surrounded by lots of trees. The AC unit was younger than both of my children and overall the place was neat as could be for it's age. SO, Monday morning I called our Real Estate Agent and said we really liked what we saw but would have to offer quite a bit less. She said we needed to hurry as the listing agent, a fellow agent of hers, said they had another offer coming in soon. SO, I raced down and we decided that we'd just offer what we could and see what happens. I also wrote the seller a letter about how we loved their house and knew it would fulfill a dream for us to have property again like we grew up with. It was what we wanted for our family. I told them everything about us. Hey! You don't ask you don't get, right? The next day we found out the other people offered full price with a 10% carry back on the loan. This woman is 85 and is being taken care of by her daughter in Florida so we were hoping the carry back wasn't going to work for them. The seller decided to look at our offer first since we made our offer first, but after we countered back and forth a couple of times the other offer came in at a full cash offer. Basically we were outbid. I decided to stop thinking about it and would just let things work themselves out. The hurricane was hitting Florida at this point so everything was crawling along at a snail's pace. It was tourture! Then something I'm still amazed at happened. The daughter said her mother wanted us to have her house. This was the house she and her husband had built with the help of her daughter. The mother knew she was accepting the lower offer and losing $25,000 but she said she wanted that family to have her house and it was important for her to know children were going to live there. I pretty much stopped breathing. Then I started crying. What an amazing gift this woman gave us. What an amazing feeling to have the Lord sitting on our shoulders. I felt it. It was my ahh, ha moment that I've always heard about people experiencing that brings them closer to the Lord. Looking back now at the turn of events, now that we're all moved in, I can honestly say there were many times we were just in the nick of time with this deal--writing the letter(which my Mom said I should write...thanks Mom!), countering back and forth and them putting us in 1st position even though they had the full cash offer with no carry back, and knowing the other people called every day to see if our deal fell through...scary! I honestly feel we were meant to be here. The weekend before our escrow was supposed to close the daughter had flown out from Florida to sell the rest of her Mom's things in a garage sale. My Dad was interested in an old truck that belonged to the lady's husband so when he talked to the daughter she said she would love to meet us. We went by and were all crying within 5 minutes. She said she and her Mom both felt that the Lord placed us in their lives and it was meant to be. Can you believe that? I told her that her mom was the gift and had made our dreams come true. She then went on to show me all of the paper work on the appliances, the blueprints, the new keys she had tooled, the new carpet warranty, and the hummingbird solution. She wanted to make sure we fed her mom's birds. Can I BE anymore connected to this woman? Feeds the birds, has a canning storage room in the garage, has a chicken coop, and planted lots of trees herself on the property...It's as if she read my mind on what I needed at our house. I still keep waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under us. It's been an amazing ride this past month. When we started moving in the daughter had left little gifts that were her mom's for each kid in the room they had showed her they wanted as their own. She had left posterboards with sweet messages written on them for each of us in our rooms. They truly are wonderful people. It's hard to believe a month ago we were signing papers and now we're moved in and planning our holidays with our family. I feel blessed to be here and will cherish every memory made possible by the generosity of one little old lady named Mary Price and the grace of God. This was my "God moment", my Mack truck, my ton of bricks. Yeah, I believe. "Can I get an AMEN?" :) I PROMISE pictures and less rambling soon. Internet issues...