God. Is. BIG.

I promised a story.  Here you go...

In September, David was offered a job in McLean, VA.  We prayed and very quickly and clearly heard God say that this was where He wanted us to go.  Ernst & Young began the process of approving his relocation to their office just outside Washington DC.  From the beginning, our prayer was simple and unchanging.  We asked God to work in such big ways throughout this process that no one could be tempted to think we made it happen.  We wanted it to be undeniable that He alone paved this path we are walking.

In October, all the approvals were final and just before Halloween, we met with our realtor in Dallas to discuss selling our home.  Joan is very experienced and great at her job, so she went about setting our expectations.  In a real estate market not kind to sellers and at a time of year so near the holidays, the likelihood of a price reduction was high.  She showed us statistics one after another predicting that our house would be on the market up to a year, most likely around 6 months.  But my Father is BIG.  Within 6 days of the sign going in the yard, we had multiple offers for the house.  A bidding war of sorts ensued and we finally accepted an offer OVER our asking price.

That alone would be huge.  But God is BIG.  I hurried to Virginia to begin the home search while David does what he does – the numbers.  We prayed over every decision and this weekend, we returned to look at houses again.  Yesterday was Saturday.  We spent the day with Melissa, our other amazing real estate agent, and scoured Northern Virginia for the place God had chosen for us.  At the end of the long day of house hunting, we started looking at further details of one house in particular.  Around 5pm, Melissa offered to call the listing agent and “just see what the situation was.”  Little did we know, at that exact moment, the sellers of this home were in a back-and-forth negotiation with other buyers.  They had just sent the buyers their final offer – their bottom dollar.  Their listing agent was open and honest, and she and Melissa contacted an attorney.  They discovered that if we put in an offer, had the contract signed and ratified before the buyers responded, the sellers could withdraw their offer with no legal implications. So at that point, the race began.  Melissa wrote up a contract and sent it to us.  While we had the hotel manager print it, Melissa drove to our hotel and we reviewed and signed the offer in the Marriott lobby.  When we realized that one page wouldn’t print, the listing agent, Amal, suggested we come to her house so we could sign the pages.  At 8pm, we loaded into Melissa’s car and headed to the house of the listing agent.  We sat at her dining room table signing papers while people arrived at her home for a party she was hosting.  It was the most unlikely scenario but Amal and her husband may be the most hospitable people I’ve ever met.  They brought us drinks and hors d'oeuvres, and a half-hour later, we found ourselves in the middle of an authentic Moroccan celebration, never looking more like we were from Texas than at that moment.  We finally headed back to the hotel, and at 3am, we received word from Amal that the party had ended, the sellers had ratified the contract and the deal with the other buyers had been nullified. 

Not only did our house in Dallas sell when others thought it couldn’t, it sold for more than we asked.  Not only did we find a house in Virginia in the middle of the holiday season, it is above and beyond what we imagined.  Not only are we closing within the month, the sellers requested the exact date we had been planning to move. Not only did we buy a house in one weekend, we did so at 3am after seeing it once!

That’s our story and we’re sticking to it!  There’s no way we could begin to think we did this.  There is one explanation alone - God is BIG.