Since I last blogged. No way. Time has not passed by that quickly! Stinking insane, I tell you!
This past month has been very busy. Our church is in the middle of a huge revival/move of God/whatever you want to call it. We've had over 50 people get all Acts 2:38 in, oh... about two weeks. Two weeks! That's craziness!
We've seen people limp in with RA and walk out straight. We've seen babies near death with EB and start getting better. We've seen people addicted to everything under the sun and throw the drugs away. We've seen people want church at their wedding. Like church, church. Typical Pentecostal Holy Ghost throw down church. We've seen our services grow from 90 on a good Sunday to around 250. That's nothing but God!
And, as such, our lives have been revolving around church. But it's amazing to see what is going on. Let's see, our week starts on Sunday. We get to church around 9:30am - if we teach Sunday School, work nursery or have a special service we get there earlier. We leave sometime between noon and two, depending upon how long people want to pray afterwards and how many people want to get baptized. Then we go home and crash.
Monday my husband goes to work and I stay with the kids doing various activities. Monday evenings we have Monday School ( a class for new Christians on the history of the Christian church and whatnot) that we teach once every two months from 6:30-7:30. At 7:00 we have prayer - if we're teaching we go straight to prayer when we're done, if we're not we just go straight to prayer. Then I have choir practice after that that lasts until about 10pm.
Tuesday we have evening service. We get there at around 6:30 for prayer beforehand and leave sometime around 9 or 10.
Wednesdays we typically have an off night.
Thursdays vary between musicians practices for my husband, ministry meetings and youth functions.
Fridays vary between having the night off and youth functions.
Saturdays we take the lead as Community Outreach Directors and go out into the community. Beforehand we make packages of drinks, snacks and information cards and go to whatever area God lays on our hearts and bless others - mostly kids or people mowing their yards in this oppressive heat - and just let them know we care. Sometimes they ask questions, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they receive us well, sometimes they don't. We don't go to witness to people or give Bible studies (unless they want us to), but rather just give them something with no strings attached. I also do weddings and portrait shoots on Saturdays.
And that brings us back to Sundays. Throw in the day-to-day life with two young ones and it gets hectic. Every moment of our lives has to be planned out or I'll miss something. Now, this isn't for everyone in the church. My husband is part of the church leadership and we gladly do what we can to help our church grow for God's glory. It's work. I won't lie. But it's what God has called us to.
Oh, yeah... and we decided to buy a house. So, in addition to all of this, I've been house hunting, neighborhood researching, number crunching and everything else. We have been feeling the itch to move for a while and were just praying for God's will. Well, everything we tried on our own failed.
We saw house after house, but nothing was perfect. We even made an offer on one, but they wanted full asking price with buyer to pay closing costs. Psh. Whatevs. We used mortgage broker after mortgage broker and it took FOREVER to hear anything on pre-approvals. You know, the supposed to be instant part. One we never heard back from at all. Everything just hit a dead end.
Until last week. Another minister's wife told me to ask one of the ladies in our church for help. She grew up in the area and is the local florist so she is virtually a walking phone book for our city. So I walked into her shop just to ask her to keep her eyes and ears open for me. She said that it was too weird, but she had just heard last night of a place for sale in a good neighborhood that would be perfect and for me to load the kids up we were going over. Right then. Not "I'll check and see if it's still available." Not "I'll give you the address, go on over. " Not "Maybe later we can head out there. "
No, it was right then. So then we went. It's a cute home on a quiet cul-de-sac, around 1800 sf, 3 beds, 2 baths, big lot and a separate studio space for my business (I was initially gonna settle for using a space bedroom just to stay in our price range, but this even has a separate entrance!). It even had the shower of my husband's dreams - one of those full shower ones with multiple shower heads from all the walls and ceiling. She's throwing in the appliances and knocked 12k off her asking price. Just for us. She had refused offers higher than that before.
My husband called to go over stuff with her and she is now turing away offers to do "whatever it takes to get y'all in." Oh, and my grandfather called completely unprompted and told me that since he heard we were buying a house he was giving us the down payment. I refused him because we're not hand out people and he said that it was his money and he could do what he wanted to. He wanted to do it and that was it. He called the lender and had them three-way call my husband and got us approved on the spot. All while I was looking at the house.
Within a matter of hours we went from not having a substantial down payment (but doing it on our own), not hearing back from any lenders, and not finding a house that was perfect to having EVERYTHING. Our pastor is going to look at it with me tomorrow because he feels that is is God's will and wants to pray over it. Home inspection is happening later this week and if that goes through, we'll be placing an offer on Monday to close next month.
Does that justify me being a bad blogger? ha!
