When my wife began to look for another teaching job one year she and I asked that the Lord would lead us to the right place. She wrote letters, made phone calls and sent emails to all the places she thought she wanted to go, but not one answer came back. No one even told her, "No, but thanks."
The only job offer came from within the same state we were currently living in and it was from a town that she did not really want to live in. To me it seemed like a direct answer to our prayers, but my wife was not convinced. There were at least six other openings for teachers in our church school system just in our state alone, and we knew of other openings in at least one other state. So then her question was, "If there are all of these other places that need a teacher why did I only get one offer? There must be more than one place that the Lord could use me."
She accepted that teaching position anyway, even though she did not really want to move there. So before we moved I went to that town and started looking for a place to live, but found nothing. Then, a month before she was to start teaching (we desperately needed to move in about a week), I woke up at 2 AM, on a Friday, and began to search the Internet for housing. We knew that we needed to get serious about finding a place to live, but in all of my searching, I couldn't find anything that looked even close to what we needed.
In addition to the high rent in the area, a tornado had just gone through the area two weeks before and so there were many other people who were looking for housing as well.
Later that Friday morning, I made two calls. The first call was to the only place that I thought I had a good chance of finding a good paying job in this new town. I did not expect, nor like, the response I got, no job. But I felt that even though I was disappointed evidently the Lord did not want me to work there. I would just need to keep trusting Him.
The second call was to the owners of the house that the previous teacher had been renting. There was no answer, but I left a message. (I found out later that the owners had already sold that house, so it was not available anyway.)
So, later that day we went shopping. When we got home, there was a message on our answering machine saying that we needed to call a man that I had called a month before about housing. When we called him he said that his daughter might have an option for us if we still needed a place to live. He said something about a 2 bedroom apartment (just what we needed), pets were OK (we had a pet), it was unfurnished (we had furnishings), it was located about one half block from the school (really?), we would have to pay the utilities, but the rent would be free. (Wow, this sounded too good to be true.)
Needless to say, we were very, VERY excited! But there was nothing else we could do that day because it was so late, except to pray which we certainly did. It was late on Friday afternoon and we were unable to call the next day because of the Sabbath. We needed to let it go for awhile, but it is very hard to keep from worrying about losing something you urgently need.
At about 9 AM Sunday we called again and this time she was there! We made an appointment to meet her in a little over two hours (the town was about two hours away). If we had waited until 10 AM to call she would not have been able to meet with us until another day. In fact, if we had waited even 15 minutes longer she most likely would have been away from the phone. She said that when we called she was just getting ready to walk out of her house for the day. (And we had been afraid of calling to early.
When we arrived, she showed us a very nice, almost new, 2 bedroom apartment, upstairs, by itself, and quiet. It even had central air and cable TV. It was partly furnished with a stove and a refrigerator that I was very thankful for. (No lugging my old stuff up the stairs!) It also had one chest-of-drawers and one single bed, exactly what we needed in addition to our own stuff. Wow!
What were our responsibilities, why the free rent? She said that once or twice a month we may be called to make some copies in the middle of the night if someone downstairs needed to be sent to the hospital. (We figured that we could handle that.)
I asked, "How much do utilities usually run? We understand that we will need to pay utilities." She said, "Oh no, utilities are completely covered. You just might want to put in your own phone if you need something other than that one", and she pointed to a phone already on the wall. I could hardly believe what I had just heard. And things got even better. She said that because the apartment was already empty and clean we could move in right away.
At that point my wife and I were sure that this was the town God wanted us to be in! It is very comforting to be positive of something like this. You can put your whole heart into a place when you know that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
Can we trust God? Does He hear our prayers? Does He always answer? Does He do more than we ask? Does He always want us to be happy?" The answer to all of these is a loud and resounding, YES! He is always amazing, what an awesome God He is! “WOW” just isn't enough!
"Trust in the LORD, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass." Psalms 37:3-5
