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Changed By Love

Changed By Love

Following the Lamb wherever he goes… Revelation 14:4

Unbelievable! Is This America?

Now I’ve heard it all. We went to see yet another house yesterday. It has 3000 sq. feet, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a BIG recreation room, and we could live there quite comfortably. But when I told the realtor that we have 10 children, she quickly said that she would have to ask the city what the occupancy limit was on this house. She said that we might not be able to get it because of the number of kids we have. I said that we have made 4 bedrooms work for years now. I asked the rhetorical question, “Is this America?” We don’t seem to have the freedom to make our own choices of how to live, where to live, what to drive, what to eat or anything basic any more. I told her that it wasn’t fair for the city to decide that for us. She acted like I thought it was her fault, so she got defensive and put the fault back on me. She said, “Your problem is you have 10 kids.” I looked her in the eye and said, “That’s not a problem.” She said something to the effect that she didn’t care how many kids I have, and I told her that I knew she didn’t care. Something was going on under the surface as I looked in her eyes and confronted that spirit of death that wants people to consider children a curse and not a blessing. I held my ground, and she continued to act like I was angry at her. In reality, it had nothing to do with her. I was angry at the regulations these cities are making that are causing people to decide that they can’t afford to have as many children as God wants to give them.

I’m angry that governments are trying to take away our rights to follow God and do what He tells us to do. The systems of this world are set up to make it nearly impossible to live by faith and totally give our lives into God’s hands. We have chosen to obey God rather than man, and the enemy doesn’t like it. He fights us at every turn.

The realtor went on to tell me of a family that has 5 kids that live in a 3 bedroom house that the city has told they better not have any more kids or they won’t be able to live in that house any more. Can you believe that? I’m appalled. This kind of stuff sounds more like China’s policies than America’s.

The socialists have done a number on our country in convincing so many people that we are overpopulated and we’re ruining the planet, and we just need to kill a bunch of people off. I don’t know why they don’t all just volunteer to go first. A world without socialists and socialist propaganda? But then what would we do if we didn’t have all their ungodly, atheistic ideas to defend our country and our children from? Maybe we would have more time and money to actually help the poor and needy, the ones that they pretend to be so concerned about.

When we looked at a house in O’Fallon, another realtor told me that they have occupancy rules that you can only have 2 children per bedroom. She said that if you have more people than that and they find out, they turn your water off and force you to move out.

We think maybe it’s time to leave this area of Belleville and O’Fallon, Illinois. Maybe it’s time to shake the dust off of our feet and move on.

Waiting Til Beyond the Last Minute

Well, I got a phone call from the owner of the house we looked at Wednesday night. Somebody made an offer last night, so he’s selling the house to them. So we’re back to the drawing board. We still don’t have a house to move to. I haven’t heard from the owner of this house yet, but I hope he calls or emails soon.

If not, I just trust God to make things work out so that we don’t have some kind of confrontation with him or the property management group. I’ll just trust God, knowing that all of this is in His hands, and He does things in His own timing- Certainly not mine!

Waiting Til the Last Minute

Well, we are still waiting and it’s only 2 days until Aug. 1, the day we were supposed to be out of this house.

Two days ago, I reached a point of frustration that had me fretting and yelling. I was racking my brain trying to figure out how to find houses for rent. I was really upset, but I kept sensing that I was just supposed to get on my knees and pray. As soon as I hit my knees, I remembered a website and a house that I had emailed about over a month ago. I thought, “I wonder if that house is still available?”

We had done everything we could do to find another house to rent. I was all stressed-out and worried about the owner of this house coming to his house with his moving truck full of his stuff and finding us still here. We haven’t been able to get in touch with him because the management group never gave us his contact number. We found out his name a while back and we knew he was an Air Force captain, but that’s all we knew.

Well, last night we went to look at the house that I emailed about over a month ago. Miraculously, it is still available. It’s out in the country and seems like it will work out really well for us. It has 3 bedrooms upstairs and 4 rooms in the basement that they can’t call bedrooms, but they could easily be used as bedrooms. After we got home from looking at it, I realized that each of our older kids could have his/her own room.

We have to wait and find out if another family who looked at it before we did wants to buy it. They are supposed to let the owner know by tomorrow.

Speaking of the owner, he is a captain in the Air Force. It took a while, but I finally realized that the Lord was telling me to ask him how to get in touch with the owner of this house that we’re in.

This morning I got an email from him that told me that he emailed the captain and gave him my email address and cell phone number and asked him to contact me. So now we will be able to explain to him what happened.

The first time I talked to the owner of the house we looked at last night, I told him what happened with the other house and then he told me that he was planning to get a property manager to handle the rental if his house didn’t sell. We found out that he was planning to hire the same group that we had problems with. He said that he had problems with the same person not getting back in touch with him in a timely manner. So he decided to go with a different property manager.

So we have had lots of connections and serendipities with this man. He said that he has had lots of prospective buyers look at his house and the realtor can’t figure out why it hasn’t sold. We think maybe we know why.

I don’t know why I let myself get all upset about all of this. Each time I prayed, the Lord gave me some instruction that helped us get closer to a solution. All the time I spent thinking and spinning my wheels, and especially the time I spent yelling 🙂 was wasted time. I should have committed this to the Lord even when my plans were going awry. I think the reason I was so upset is that I made such sweet plans and they all got ruined. So that made me mad. I’m not usually a big control freak. But this time I was at least a little one.

It Seemed Like Such a Simple Plan – MY Plan

I was planning to write a post bewailing the fact that everything always has to be so hard. Nothing ever just falls into place for us. We always have to wait and wait and wait until the victory comes.

We had it all planned out. We would move our stuff out of this house and have all the kids set up in our new house, then I could come back to this house and clean it and it would actually stay clean because the kids wouldn’t be here. We were going to do it calmly and methodically, step by step and it was going to be wonderful. But my plans fell through with a crash when the house we chose and put down a deposit for and paid for half a month’s rent was never cleaned and made ready for us as we had been promised it would. We finally had to get out of the contract, and now the houses that we saw online that would work for us have all been taken.

We are in a pickle. I’ve been emailing, calling, going to see houses and trying to figure out what to do for the last week. So I was going to write about it and complain. But then I read this article on Robin’s Heart of Wisdom blog. I now realize that I got caught in the do-dos again. As many times as I have had to wait on God and depend on Him, you would think I would have learned by now that the best thing I can do in a crisis is to wait before the Lord in prayer and ask Him to move on our behalf. Shawn was telling me this last night, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear it. Now I get it. So instead of writing a whiny blog post, I’m going to get down on my knees right now and do the most effective work I can do to bring about our solution.