Burnt Up Dreams

Life is full of dreams, isn’t it?

Dreams to start a family, dreams to land the perfect job, or to meet prince charming.

One of my dreams is to buy a fixer upper house of our own, and transform it into a beautiful one that we could call home. My husband works in construction, and I’ve seen the incredible things he is capable of that basically makes it look like a fairy godmother went around waving her magic wand everywhere.

I’m an artist and I love letting my creative juices flow during the designing phase of a house remodel. This wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself. But when you mix it with the fact that I tend to get attached to things easily, then it becomes a problem.

We found a house a couple of months ago. It seemed perfect. It wasn’t actually on the market, but we found out about it through someone at our church. It was a sore sight to say the least, and we knew it would be a lot of work for just the two of us.

But we were ready. We felt right about this one.

You see, this wasn’t the first house we had come across in our short two years of being married. We had been presented with a handful of other house options, and each time there had been some reason that we couldn’t make a move. Either it was related to finances, or it had some significant structural issue. It was always something.

This time it was different though. We could afford it, we felt like the house was a good fit for us, it had charm, etc. I didn’t even get attached at the beginning, because this had happened before and I knew there was a good chance I would be let down in all my dreaming and plan-making. We put in a written offer with a letter explaining our situation, and prayerfully put it in God’s hands.

Then came the waiting.

W A I T I N G — isn’t that just an awful word?

I am no good at it.

During the waiting phase, my brain convinced myself that it would be a good idea to start sketching up some ideas of floorplans for this house. Then I started letting the questions form; What color would we paint the walls? What would we do with this extra bedroom? Which walls would need to be torn down in order to make that “open concept” that’s so popular these days? You guys, the questions didn’t stop during the entire waiting process.

And naturally, I answer questions. So as these questions started to fill up my imagination, I placed answers to them, and pretty soon I was in over my head. I knew where we would build a little fence for our dog. I knew what the entryway would look like. I knew where I wanted the master bath. And I wanted all of it.

For two weeks, our life was on hold because we were anxiously hoping that maybe this was what God had in mind for our future.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, we didn’t get the house. It wasn’t just a “no,” though. It was more like a “probably no, but we’ll keep you in mind.” Part of me wanted to hold on to that tiny bit of hope. But during the two weeks of waiting, I had promised myself that I would burn all the papers and things that related to this house if we didn’t get a “yes” on our offer. I didn’t want to be controlled by this anymore.

So after we got the discouraging call that left us confused and a little bit hurt, we took the sketches we had made of “our house” and the letter we had written, and burned them. The weather was fitting for our mood; the rain made it difficult to burn our dreams, but we were determined. After the flame died and the raindrops made the smoke disappear, we went inside.

We rarely speak of that house anymore, and I still don’t know why God put it in our path. But we’ve started to move on and step out in faith in different ways than we originally thought, and we’re excited to see what other surprises will come into view in the future. It doesn’t always turn out the way you think, but it does have a tendency to be better than you imagined.

Now, we have flights booked for Colombia and we will be gone for the month of January. I don’t know what all will happen or who we will meet, but I have a feeling there’s something pretty exciting around the corner.

P.S. If you would like to follow along on our trip, go sign up for my travel blog updates here.