"Dream" house

Another weekend come and gone and another 9 houses crossed off our list. It has been grueling. I must confess I haven't been in the greatest of head spaces and I've spewed a bitter word or two. We kicked off the weekend on Friday with 6 home tours. The first five places were awful, leaving me discouraged and heavy-hearted. The 6th one put a twinkle back in my eye, albeit brief. It had been sitting on the market for 50 some days and so were hoped to low ball them but a quick call to the selling agent revealed that someone else was making an offer and it was going to go pending in the morning. Of course it was. Just last week, another door closed when we finally decided to re-offer on the old house we loved near downtown Bothell. It had been sitting for a month and a half with no action but then went pending 20 minutes after we decided to make an offer, a very clear "no."

 

Doors keep closing (slamming really) and though I am grateful for clear answers, I feel like I don't have time to back out of the way before they barrel into me. To put it frankly, I'm tired of spending the majority of our free time packing 3 kids who are no longer so fond of the house searching process around home tours. Summer has come and gone and despite more than 50+ tours, we have nothing to show for it. Forgive us, friends, if you feel like we are absent. This home-buying-home-touring business is a part time job.

As we journey deeper into this process, I feel our criteria growing more shallow by the minute. Ok fine, we'll be content with a smaller yard. And maybe said "yard" could even be made up of cliff-like drop offs. I mean, at least we'd have a yard, right? I suppose I don't have to have a gas range in the kitchen. And the house doesn't need to have an open floor plan. And I guess we could possibly get by with only 3 bedrooms. I love mauve bathtubs! Maybe it's too much to ask for to hope for a space to garden. Sure, we'll live on a busy road. With regulations keeping us from putting up a fence to keep our kids safe. We'll commute 45 minutes to work, church and family. And a I guess we could even live in a split level. And we'll go out of our means to do so. Suddenly it's as if all the wonderful things we spent 7 long years in our condo dreaming about are totally out of reach. And I am struggling. Call me selfish, call me ungrateful or call me honest. This is where I was this weekend.

I went for a nice hard run on Saturday morning. As I ran, I spewed out my frustrations to God, uncensored and unabashed. I would highly recommend this process (it felt amazing). I so often filter my prayers, trying to make them positive in a desperate attempt to count my blessings. But I just wasn't there yet on Saturday. I'm still not. I needed some time to just hash it out with God. As I considered our "house wish list" and began to come to terms with the fact that God very well might have something entirely different in mind, my prayer shifted. Instead of pleading for a specific floor plan, I began to pray that, wherever we end up, can I please just be really, really excited about it? Ecstatic even?

If I get absolutely nothing I've been dreaming of, oh please I just want to burst with joy over whatever it is that it cannot be contained. Pretty please? May I be elated?