This last Wednesday Matt and I hit a pretty hard low. We had applied for a house in Thousand Oaks that seemed perfect. Beautiful, quiet neighborhood on a culdasac. A great park was just half a block down the road. The price wasn't bad at all for the amount of house we would be getting and it had a yard with green grass!!! I couldn't ask for more and it looked like God was blessing us with favor also. There were 3 other applicants and the people had told us as long as our application looked good then they would go with us. I was so excited and sure it was what was supposed to happen. I prayed that the Lord would continue to open the doors if this was Him and shut them if it wasn't, but I didn't really want Him to shut them if it wasn't. This was what I wanted. Then the next day they got back to us and said they weren't going to be able to go with us because of the lack of current income coming in. It hit hard. The enemy came in like a flood that nothing was going to change. No door was going to open, we would be stuck in these hotels forever. It wasn't pretty. Then Matt said that while he was sitting in front of that house, he asked the Lord if this was the house. He said he heard very quietly, no...I want you closer. That hit me and the Holy Spirit began to deal with my heart. Thousand oaks is beautiful and quiet. It has the stores that I'm used to. The roads are more spread out and it doesn't feel like there are a million people in such a small space. It's very comfortable. It's like over an hour away from LA. In fact it's like picking up Nixa or Branson and dropping it in California. I was going back to the comfortable, the old, what I knew. Just like the Israelites that wanted to go back to Egypt instead of enduring to the promised land. The Lord began to speak to Matt and I. When we lived in Branson, Springfield was like an hour away and how much did we pour into it. Sure we visited every now and again, but we weren't involved in the community in any way. It would be no different if we lived in Thousand Oaks. He wasn't calling us to the comfortable. He is calling us out of our comfort zone into something new. He kept leading me to Jeremiah 29:5..."Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." He wants us to be apart of the place He has sent us. So I had to Let go of my desires, I had to surrender. Because even though these are desires of mine, He knows, even better than I do, that my deepest desire is to follow Him and live in the fullness of what He has planned for me. Even though I can be quite strong willed and tend to fight Him on many occasions. And I reminded Him how I don't like the city and how UNcomfortable this all is and He reminded me of the next paragraph in Jeremiah 29:11 "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for peace and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." So by His Grace I let it go. Where do you want us Lord? We will go.
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