the post-karmic stream

This has been an arduous season…

We started a journey in January.  My wife and I agreed that it was finally time to sell our first house.  Our charming 1930s craftsman home, the only house our daughter had ever known, was going to be put on the market.

Over the course of many months, we received 5 offers, two contracts, and dozens upon dozens (upon dozens) of people streaming through our house.

We took down family photos, put half of our lives in storage, and generally lived in a staged model home (with a toddler) for the first half of 2012.  Coupled with the fact that Stef was pregnant (2nd and 3rd trimester pregnant), I don’t really know how she kept everything looking so amazing.

We were to close on the sale of our home on June 1st and had a contract to buy a close on the purchase of our next home that same day.

For a myriad of reasons, everything has fallen through.  Being the most expensive house (per/sf) in an inner city (and still gentrifying) neighborhood at the beginning of a recovery is not an enviable sales position.  The Great Recession reduced the “comps” in the area to just about nothing.  Several other homes are facing the same problems and we’ve commiserated with our neighbors who have had the same troubles - namely willing buyers eager to pay what we’re asking and unwilling appraisers who can’t justify the price being paid.

So, we are (as of today) not moving.  We will live in a house that somehow doesn’t really feel like our house now.  We will wait a year, wait for someone else to be the pioneer of the recovery, and maybe use those comps to sell next year.

Who really knows?

Of the many lessons learned, one of the biggest is really how little control we have over any circumstance. Our job on this earth is much more to read and react with optimism and hope and much less to lament and wrestle the false perception of control whenever possible.

There is that other lesson of what God is doing in our midst.  We won’t get to stand and applaud Him for bending to our will to move.  Rather, we pause and wait, reminding ourselves about His timing and His will being so much better informed than our own.

So maybe we didn’t sell our house. That doesn’t mean we didn’t get full value in the process.  It may only mean that value was not in equity towards a new home but rather in wisdom to use as we make our way back home in this life.

This has been an arduous season. Thankfully, even with our house unsold, this is not the end.