It’s been awhile since I wrote here, but it’s been awhile since I’ve really had something to say too. Life has been busy - the last few months were full of planning Duk’s birthday basketball tournament, studying for my Supply Chain APICS exam (which I now put on the backburner for awhile), working, and the big one - looking towards purchasing a home.
Whether or not you live in the bay area, buying a home is a BIG investment - not only of money, but of time and sanity as well. ESPECIALLY in the Bay Area however, home buying is ridiculously competitive and often disheartening - for example when you see a list price, you should automatically add 10-20% to what you offer if you hope to have even the slightest chance at winning the bid. Another example is when you see the 100 page disclosure doc that the previous owner sends to you, fully summarizing every tiny little thing wrong with the house - fungus, termites, permits to apply for, regulations that aren’t met, and estimates on how much you will pay to fix it. I honestly had no idea that we were getting into all of this when we started our housing search.
Living in the Bay Area is a huge huge blessing, since we get to be at the epicenter of all up and coming tech, have beautiful weather year round (although some rain would be nice...), and it is a dream for many to relocate here. Having been born and raised here, I sometimes take for granted the sacrifices that my parents made for us to get the best education from amazing schools, and to provide us a stable home and safe neighborhood to live in. However, the cost of living here isn’t cheap. My parents told me a story just last week, about the first home they purchased - they scraped together every last penny they had to get enough for the down payment, and lived without a refrigerator for 3 months. They also did not own a washer, and with my sister just being born, my mom was handwashing all of her baby clothes. Mom’s out there - can you imagine HAND washing your baby’s clothes, complete with 5 outfit changes a day covered in poop and spit up?! Luckily, their church family donated $10 each to purchase them an extremely cheap washer that my mom said was the BIGGEST blessing, and ended up lasting a good 5 years. Now that I’m searching for a house, I am faced with the possibility of those same kinds of sacrifices in order to pull together enough $ to become a home owner - sacrifices I’ve NEVER had to make (#firstworldproblems). Living in the Bay Area is a blessing, and a curse.
We put in our first ever offer on a house that we REALLY like, but don’t love, yesterday. I say that we don’t love it because we know we are making some compromises. In a market like this with the $ we have, we can’t afford a “perfect” home, and we know that full well. It will be an amazing blessing if we are even able to win this house. We wrote a letter to the homeowners, telling them why they should pick us, including pictures from our wedding and engagement shoots, hoping that they will be moved emotionally if not financially by our offer. Our realtors, who have been super amazing and helpful in this whole process, were given a chance to present in person, which they did yesterday at 1pm -- the deadline for offers was 3pm yesterday. We knew from their meeting that there were at least 10 other offers on the table, and while ours had the best terms, we were not the highest in price. Now, today almost 24 hours later, we haven’t heard anything back yet. With every hour that passes, I am more and more nervous, excited, and worried - all at the same time.
The toughest thing for me though, has been the silence that I’ve felt from God in this whole process. I’ve prayed, together with D and independently on my own, with other family members, and even asked for extra prayers from our closest friends. But we haven’t heard anything. No doors have been totally closed yet, and no doors have magically opened either. I have really been struggling to know what this means. Does God bless us in our housing search, or does He want us to stop and wait?
I remember reading chapter 7 of Deuteronomy that I read in my morning bible study 2 weeks ago. This was the only time that I felt God speaking to me about this whole home buying experience. The chapter is called, “Driving out the Nations.”
7 When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you... 6 For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
7 The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.
17 You may say to yourselves, “These nations are stronger than we are. How can we drive them out?” 18 But do not be afraid of them; remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. 19 You saw with your own eyes the great trials, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and outstretched arm, with which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples you now fear.
One of the main reasons I’ve been stressed out is because we don’t have enough $ for the down payment for 20%. Even with the help of both my parents and D’s parents, we BARELY have enough and are still on the lower end of the spectrum to bid on a house in a decent neighborhood and school district. This has made me so stressed out, and feeling like we don’t have enough, wondering how and why everyone else around us has been able to achieve the purchase of a new home when we can hardly scrape together the funds?
I think its pretty self explanatory why the verses above gave me hope when I first read them, and why they give me hope now as well. There will always be people out there that are stronger and bigger than us - in their assets, their connections, and their abilities. But that doesn’t matter in the eyes of our all knowing God. I believe that God was also telling me that no matter what it is that we do in this process of home buying - as long as we honor Him and stay faithful to Him, He will bless us. And it might be with this house, and it might not be. But at the end of the day, we trust that His plan for us is the best. He knows our 10 year future when all I can see is a few steps ahead. He sees the beautiful house we will eventually grow our family in, while I can only see despair as the housing prices continue to rise.
But I don’t want to feel that way anymore. I don’t want to be upset at myself and at D for not doing enough to save earlier on in our lives. I don’t want to be defined by the amount of money and assets that I own. I want to be thankful for what I already have today - which is more than I could have ever imagined. I want to think of those in parts of the world that have nothing but the clothes on their back, and no bed to sleep in at night, and to be humbled in contrast by the wonderful apt that we are able to rent, and my closet full of choices. I want to remember that everything that I already have was a blessing from Christ that I never deserved. I want to know that when we do one day own our house, it will also be a blessing from Him that He delivered to us, single-handedly, not by our own merits or worth or abilities, but because He loved us so and wanted to give us the best. Today, this is what I proclaim - that my worthiness is not determined by the amount of money in my savings account, but by His GREAT love for me. No matter what happens with this bid or any other future bid, I will hold this as a truth in my heart.
*EDIT* - Just as an update, we did not get the house. So it looks like that was the first truly closed door for us. I have to say that I was more disappointed and depressed than I thought I would be. It’s tough to always stay optimistic. But thankfully, I had D and my mother and other friends and colleagues around to comfort me and to keep me optimistic, and of course this post that I wrote - to remind me that God’s in control no matter what, and that means that the best is still yet to come :) Thanks everyone for journeying with me!
