The Dream House and my delayed Deja Vue
A Rock of Remembrance
It was Sunday, August 23, 2020. Our tenth wedding anniversary.
After church, I’d planned to take Eden and the kids out to Himitangi Beach. Late winter, but North Island winters can be mild enough for a beach walk if you wrap up a tad against the likely westerly blowing. You can enjoy bare feet in the sand feels if you’re reasonably tough.
Himitangi was always a good outing. You can drive a Land Cruiser along the beach there. The kids loved standing up through the sunroof packed tight together as we’d putt across the sand at low-tide. There were a few places where you could venture up into the sandhills and have a go at four-wheel driving too.
So far, anyway, I’d never got stuck. Or swamped by fast rising tide action. A fact I hoped to preserve.
Not like the owner of this Suzuki who’d wandered off down Himatangi beach on Shanks pony for 2 hours to arrive back just 10 minutes too late to save his car.
In summer we’d swim or boogie board the surf. The boards also worked sliding down sandhills. In winter there were fewer people around, heaps more space, and that super fresh salty air you really notice when you’ve been away from it a few months.
I’d been looking forward to it.
We never made it.
After church, for reasons I can’t recall now, we changed plans and decided to visit my sister at her farm twenty minutes away. It was her birthday so we could enjoy a double celebration over afternoon tea.
Trouble was, we took longer than expected getting organized. By the time we headed east out of Woodville, it was just after three. Afternoon tea was normally right then, so we were already looking a bit useless.
Just as we neared the edge of town I suddenly noticed a pair of those familiar dark blue and red open-home flags yelling “hey you, look at me”. Outside the very house I’d been trying not to think about.
A month earlier, it had come back on the market.
When we’d arrived in Tararua District three years before, I’d noticed that house. It sat perhaps 150 meters down a long lazy-curved driveway, with white sheep grazing green paddocks. A massive sized home for Woodville when it was built in the late 80’s, and possibly still the largest in town. It had a unique style I’d always wondered about.
Earlier in 2020, it had been listed for sale, then taken off the market once the COVID lockdown scuttled pretty much everything. Now it was back, at a lower asking price. Nine percent lower.
We weren’t looking to move.
Our fourth child was born in April during lockdown and our existing house was starting to feel a bit cramped, particularly when Sunday evening home group time came around. I’d wondered what it might cost to add another room one day, and a builder friend had given me an estimate which’d put that thought to rest immediately.
Eden and I had talked vaguely about finding a bigger place on the outskirts of town in a few years time. Couple of acres perhaps. Sheep, pets, a bit more room for kids to hoon around.
But this 4500 square foot home on three acres was way out of our league.
When it first came on the market back in January I’d felt nothing. But as I drove past and saw the Property Brokers sign back up in late July, I’d heard His distinct voice in my spirit as plain as day instructing me to “call Jude and go look at it.”
I most certainly did not.
I’d no desire to take Eden and the children through a house like that, get everyone imagining themselves loving living there, then have to admit, “Well, that was nice. We can’t afford it, and wouldn’t you know it but all the banks agree with me.”
Who wants to start something they can’t finish? No desire to be that idiot fool. But my non-funny conviction refused to leave. I’d got to the point of thinking ok Lord, I’ll tee up a viewing on the sly - no one else needs to know.
Anyway, there we were on our anniversary, running late for my sister’s birthday, about to pass the very house I’d avoided for over three weeks.
And the open-home flags were out.
It felt as if the Lord had removed all the usual obstacles. I didn’t need to ring the agent to arrange a viewing. We could pull over, walk in, have a look under the guise of just being nosey pokes, then carry on to Kumeroa.
So I hit the brakes and started pulling onto the grassy verge.
Eden looked at me.
“What are you doing?”
Fair question, given we were already late.
“It’s an open home,” I said. “Could be fun. We might never get another chance to see inside a house like that.”
We parked, got the kids safely across the road, and walked down the driveway.
Jude, the real estate agent, was standing at the front door. She’d sold us our current house a couple of years earlier, so knew us. Most of the interest had been from investors, she said. Then “This house needs a family.”
Well yeah, agents say absolutely anything to make a deal feel good :)
Next, the exact thing I’d hoped to avoid happened almost immediately.
Our eldest daughter ran upstairs, found the obvious girls’ bedroom, and began jumping up and down.
“This is my room! This is my room!”
Ugh! I spotted Jude’s lips forming a wry grin. Double Ugh!
The house had seven bedrooms. Four upstairs above the living, kitchen, and dining areas. Three downstairs making up a wing with it’s own fancy bathroom, separate toilet, and own living/games room and finally into the original car garage which had been converted into a nice large office.
I could see it working for counseling and coaching without clients having to walk through our family space. It might suit my parents one day too. In the meantime, it could be used for guests and/or AirBnB.
The house was properly solid. Nearly forty years old but built well: a concrete tile roof, old-fashioned plaster walls, a renovated kitchen, new carpet, new showers and toilets, double-glazed ranch sliders, and a large concrete deck on the western side.
Serious money had been spent over the previous five years preparing it for sale by the current owners who’d lived there for 19 years after buying it from the original resident and actual builder himself, a well-known local carpenter.
Everything being hunky dory mattered. We weren’t keen on buying a wreck and spending years trying to turn it into something livable. We wanted a home we could use immediately for what we felt called to, a place where people could come, eat, talk, pray, and stay if they needed to.
There was also a four-bay detached garage, nearly as big as the 3-bedroom house we were living in. Room for a workshop, cars, storage, and plenty besides. A pond. A hay barn. Timber-railed sheep paddocks. A chicken run at the end of the back yard that could include the dozen chooks at no extra cost if you wanted.
The kids were suitably impressed.
As we went through the place, I saw possibilities everywhere. It suited the life we’d talked about having, though I hadn’t imagined having it any time soon.
We finished the viewing and carried on to my sister’s and a good afternoon celebrating her birthday and our anniversary.
Later that night, Eden brought the house up first. She said it had been inspiring as it was fun to imagine living in a place like that someday.
So I told her what I hadn’t said in the car. I’d felt prompted to look at it for weeks, but I’d been avoiding it because I could see no earthly way we’d ever afford it.
We decided to pray about it.
By the end of the week we’d decided to have a crack at it.
The road from there was far from straightforward. Our offer was accepted but financing was difficult. There were disappointments and anxious moments. At one point, a higher cash offer looked as though it would take the house away from us.
But God provided.
Our home had increased in value far more than I’d expected during the two years we’d owned it. On the last possible day a long-term friend offered us bridging finance to cover the period between going unconditional and selling our current house.
Then, later that same day a few long-term supporters, who’d been big supporters of what we were doing for many years, decided to invest financially as well.
We didn’t need the banks.
The sale went unconditional in late October. We moved in on December 16, and were able to enjoy hosting Christmas for other family in the area as well as my parents who came down.
A cool detail I don’t want to overlook is that on the very morning we first saw the house, before church and before our anniversary plans changed, Eden and I had read chapter one of Dream Big by Bob Goff together. It had been the next book in our queue to read.
Well... that was totally You, Lord.
Only later did I begin to see why He’d been so persistent about getting us through that front door.
Our previous place had already been feeling stretched, more like cramped, when thirty or more people turned up for home group on a Sunday night. Then COVID came, along with restrictions that local churches enforced in ways many of us couldn’t conscientiously go along with. Some people were put out of their churches. Others quit quietly.
We all still needed somewhere to gather, eat together, pray, sing, and remember we weren’t alone.
Our home fellowship had started about five years earlier out in Kumeroa with only a handful of people. But by the time we moved to town, we often had thirty and occasionally forty coming for a shared meal, singing, prayer, conversation, and fellowship.
At the new house, during the worst of the ongoing covid craziness across 2021, we hosted up to seventy people on a Sunday night.
We supposed to stop hard at fifty according to the New Zealand government. We never knew who’d come, and I decided we were gonna welcome however many the Lord brought along.
The big deck was useful. The huge kitchen was a fun place to hang out and chat. There was plenty of yard space for all the children to run about playing cops and robbers once it got dark out. And enough private corners to find somewhere quieter to talk over a cuppa and pray with one another.
During a worrying time, it became a refuge.
My parents came down every month or two and stayed in the separate wing, sometimes for a week or more. Eden got to know the neighbors, as she does, and before long people seemed to be coming around for informal Bible studies, cuppas or conversations over meals.
Eden has always had a quiet peaceful way of meeting people where they are, then somehow ending up talking with them about God, what He’s doing in their lives, or what He might want to do.
The furniture I’d brought back to New Zealand from the days of my timber and furniture-making business in Tanzania finally had a house big enough to use it all. The house interior timber work, the stairways, doors and window frames etc matched the beautiful dark brown hardwood mninga tones perfectly. I hadn’t expected to find a house that suited it so well.
Then, a couple months after we’d moved in, I remembered something long forgotten from my 2010 bachelor days.
I’d lived in a seven-bedroom house before. In Uganda.
While there, I’d prayed a particular prayer to God because of that particular 7-bedroom life experience. I hadn’t made the connection when we first looked through the house in Woodville nor during the drawn out buying process.
But eventually it came back to me.
Seven bedrooms then. Seven now.
God is good at answering my heart-cry prayers.
He knows what to provide, and He often begins providing it long before we see how it could ever be possible. Sometimes He asks for one small act of obedience that looks pretty foolish from the outside. Pulling over at an open home when you’re already late for afternoon tea doesn’t feel like a grand spiritual achievement.
But it can be the revealing of something you didn’t even know had been growing secretly unseen. The first leaf breaking out of the soil from a seed He planted deep in your heart a decade earlier. All of a sudden it’s growing bigger and bigger until it eventually blossoms into an answered dream.
You don’t have to manufacture the outcome, and you don’t have to pretend you’ve got the resources. We certainly didn’t. But when He speaks and coincidences get to clicking, it’s worth taking it to Him honestly rather than explaining, yet again, why it could never work.
Another rock of remembrance.
God is good.