As we let go of the house, something very interesting happened: the idea of renting it out stopped being so awful. Aside from all of the logistical issues of renting our house out, the REAL reason was that we didn’t want to have to see other people living in it. We didn’t want to come here to repair something and see someone else’s life taking up our home. But after having the house on the market and being completely prepared to say goodbye to it for good, we realized that it is just a house and that renting it out could have some pretty cool benefits, too.
Suddenly, what hadn’t even been a real option before was on the table again, and this time, we were taking it quite seriously. We spoke with some people who rent out their first family home (they’ve rented it out for more than 20 years), borrowed contracts and application forms, and began doing research about the laws and taxes related to leasing. We also spent a LOT of time praying about it, and we received blessings to rent through two people who we really respect: Kerry Henderson and my dad.
Both men suggested that we rent it out to begin with, but we just weren’t in the place to hear that at the time. However, when we brought it up again, Kerry was excited and shared a lot of advice about how they’ve been doing it from Africa, and my dad was thrilled to help us out however we needed. Just like that, we had totally changed plans AND enlisted my dad as our official property manager!
This week we will be putting the sign in the front yard and doing all final repairs to get the house rental-ready. It’s all mostly done from when we listed it, but we did have a few maintenance issues that we are finishing up (replacing all of the tub/shower tile…not fun!). We are going to begin moving our things over to the camper, and hopefully have someone else in the house in no time!
Through this whole thing, we finally realized that God maybe doesn’t care so much exactly what we do with the house, but really just cares about our attitudes toward it. I think that we HAD to go through the experience of putting the house on the market just so that we would let go of it and not allow it to be a stumbling block. And that is what I think God is most concerned with…that the house not be a barrier to our service. There are certainly costs and benefits to both plan, but we really feel God’s blessing on this, and a tremendous peace about doing something that we originally did NOT want to do!
I recently heard someone talking about Jonah and how sometimes God has to take us all the way over THERE just to bring us back to HERE where he originally wanted us…it’s just that the journey over THERE gives us the right attitudes, strengths, and humility to make us willing to do whatever He asks. We are kind of kicking ourselves that we wasted almost six months on our journey to over THERE when we could have been paying off student loan debt and living completely simplified lives this whole time, but we are incredibly thankful that God loves us enough to patiently wait for us to have a change of heart and to go through our very human processes in order to be obedient.