The first seven months of 2024 have been nothing short of a wild, crazy, difficult, and amazing ride. Last year (2023) ended with an emergency hospital stay that continued into the new year. By the end of January I had, finally, begun to see signs of full recovery and welcomed with open arms the hope of having my full health restored. Little did I know that my sudden health issues were only just the beginning of what I now call my family's "Journey Towards The Next".
For the sake of prophetic context, I will begin by sharing what my daughters had both so aptly heard from the Lord just seven months prior. In early June of 2023, while driving to school one morning, my oldest daughter (Calleigh), seemingly out of nowhere, announced that the Lord told her that "it is time to look for a new home". I asked her what had prompted her to share this all of a sudden. She simply said that it is what she had heard. Now what she had said was neither surprising or outside of what I had been sensing myself, however, there was something in her voice that I knew it was the Lord speaking. I knew this was a declaration and not a passing thought or a good idea. It wasn't more than a week later that my other daughter (Caitlin) came to me one afternoon and told me about what the Lord had been speaking to her. She explained that for three days in a row when she sat down to read her bible it was opened up to the twentieth chapter of a book. Each day a different book but the same chapter number - 20. On the third straight day she decided to look up what the number twenty might represent in the bible. What she found was that the number twenty often represented "the completion of a long waiting period". As she shared all of this with me, I knew, once again, that the Lord was speaking to us as a family. I knew that what Calleigh had heard and shared and now what Caitlin had heard and shared was connected. Through my children the Lord was telling our family that it was time to look for a new home and that a long waiting period was coming to an end.
A week later Caitlin came to me and this time told me that, once again, for three days in a row every time she opened her bible it was to a different book but this time it was the eighth chapter of each book. So, again, she looked up what the number eight might represent in the bible. She looked it up and found that eight often represents "a new beginning" in the bible. As I heard this, I started to get real excited. The Lord was announcing a completion, a new beginning, and a new home. Then over the next week I started hearing about the number eight and seeing it show up all over the place during my day to day activities. This was all during the month of June. One day I suddenly realized that August is the eighth month of the year. So I went to the calendar in our kitchen and circled the date August 20 (8/20). I knew what the Lord had spoken and here we are a couple months away from what could be a miraculous fulfillment the words He gave my girls on the exact date using the numbers He had shown Caitlin. I hurried up and gathered the family to show them the date circled on the calendar and asked us all to pray and continue to seek the Lord for further direction for this word He had given us.
So over the next couple of months we dove deep into looking at houses and dreaming with the Lord over what this all could mean and what it might look like (it is always so much fun to explore the possibilities of what God might do, knowing it will usually look different, but whatever it is it will be Him and it will be good). Still the fact remained that in the natural we were barely getting by financially. Even with an amazingly low mortgage and a house that met our current needs, we were maxed out with nothing left in the tank (financially speaking). We knew there was good equity in our home should we sell, but we had incurred some debt and had nothing available as a down payment for a new house, let alone extra money to take on a higher mortgage for an upgraded home. We knew it had to be God and likely a "suddenly" of God for anything to change. As August came and went there was no sign of change. We had to wonder what was the Lord doing and how to continue to walk in this word He had so clearly given to us. Without any real answers and a whole lot of questions, we just continued on looking at houses and considering what all of this meant.
Fast forward to March 8, 2024, I am in the kitchen getting lunches ready for the girls' school day. It is around 7am in the morning and I notice about an inch of standing water in the laundry area. I notice that there was laundry in the dryer and the washer door was opened so I assumed someone had somehow opened the door too early and that was the cause of all the water on the ground. I asked Calleigh what had happened and she said that it was there when she moved her clothes over from the washer to the dryer. A couple minutes later my wife went into the garage to get something and saw that the carpet in the garage was soaking wet. I came out to explore and at that time discovered that the area surrounding our water heater was under water. After some time of investigation and an emergency call to the plumber, it became apparent that the filter on top of our water heater had become a fountain flowing water throughout the house under the floor boards. Our garage, kitchen, and the entryway of our house were completely drenched. Our house was flooded. In a matter of days, our house became a disaster area with fans everywhere and drywall ripped out and appliances pulled from the wall. Thus began our adventure as a family living without a home.
The Lord blessed us beyond measure with a home owner's insurance company that made a tough situation so smooth and worry free throughout this entire journey (Heritage Insurance - for those who might be interested). For the first four weeks they put us up in a in a hotel while they searched for a long term rental home for us to stay in during our house repair and remodel. Praise the Lord, the kids were able to have a room for themselves and Leslie and I our own room. We couldn't imagine what life would have looked like had the four of us all had to share one hotel suite for 4 weeks (God is so good). From there we moved into a beautiful home near downtown Beaufort where we stayed for three months before moving to another rental home only a few blocks down the way. I would be lying if I said there weren't days of weariness and exhaustion as we completed the 2023-24 school year in temporary living spaces, and as summer has wore on and we are still in transition (at the writing of this post we are two weeks away from moving into our fourth living space in five months). However, there is no doubt from any of us that the grace of God has been the central glue that has kept us together and kept us in hope for what the Lord has ahead for us.
Here is where I will tie all of this together (for those who have endured this long post and are still actually reading). For those who may have missed it, March 8 was the day we discovered the flood (8 = new beginnings). As soon as we realized that insurance had decided to cover a complete remodel of our house due to the amount of damage from the flood, Leslie and I felt that this was not a disaster, rather the provision we had been seeking (God's ways are not our ways, thankfully). The question we had to wrestle with was whether we tried to keep this house and use it as a rental while pursuing to buy a new home, or sell it outright and use the funds for a new home. After a few weeks of praying and exhausting all of our options based on what we had available in the natural and exploring the words the Lord had given us about the house we had and the promise of a new home, we felt clear that we were to sell the home and buy a new home. After a series of God-ordained encounters, including finding our realtor "by chance" (by divine orchestration) a day after we discovered the flood in our home, we now find ourselves less than 30 days from closing on the sale of our home (it was bought by our neighbor/friend's adult daughter - a whole other testimony there) and moving into a home double in square footage, a new-build (new beginnings - literally), and in a community called Salem Bay (Salem meaning peace!). And the final piece to the fulfillment of the prophetic words from my daughters...the closing date for the sale of our house is set for August 19. That would mean that the on August 20 we would have completed the 3 and a half years of living in and owning that house (20 - the completion of a long waiting period). Only God!
There is a lot more to this story, but I'll save those details for the book that will come at some point. In closing, what started as a word from the Lord to my daughters has become our family's testimony of our Journey Towards The Next. What journey are you on? I'd love to hear you and your family's stories as well. Write in the comments so we can celebrate together what the Lord has done and is doing in all our lives. Blessings!
Flooded House and Repairs:
Hotel and Rental Homes
Remodel
The Building of our New Home
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