As I said last week, we had no idea what the future held when we sold our home and sold or gave away most of our belongings in 2008 prior to returning to Japan. We didn’t know if we’d have any resources left to eventually begin life again in the U. S. after our service in Japan was done.

But God… In Matthew 6, He says, “Don’t worry about what to eat, what to drink, or what to wear for your Heavenly Father knows you have need of them and He’ll give them to you if you give Him first place in your life.” (My paraphrase of verses 31-32.) Because of His amazing outpouring in various ways, we didn’t have to use any of the resources I mentioned last week during our time in Japan, and we never lacked for anything. One of our supporters told us, “I don’t pray for you that much, I just pray every day, ‘Give them all the money they need, God!’ ” That prayer was abundantly answered.

When the Lord began to call us from Japan three years later, I started looking at houses online, mainly in Sandy Lake and Stoneboro where we’d lived before and in Grove City near our church. We never talked about it, but in the back of my mind I had a list of what I thought we needed in a retirement home: bedroom, bathroom, laundry room on the main floor, and a garage, and on my wish list, a family room. Homes that met my criteria in our price range were almost nonexistent.

The night we discovered we weren’t going to New Zealand (a real possibility─but that’s a story for another day), I couldn’t sleep and searched again online for houses. I discovered there were three pages of houses for sale in Greenville─I’d only skimmed one page the few times I’d even looked in Greenville. There on page three was a house that met every criteria for about half the price we’d thought we’d have to pay. But Greenville? I’d never wanted to live in Greenville… However, two of our children and three of our grandchildren lived there, so maybe it wasn’t a bad idea.

I left the website open, praying that if this house was God’s provision for us, Donn would be excited and would want to pursue it. He was and he did… We arrived in the States on August 4 and signed an agreement on this house on August 5─final settlement on August 31, 2011. Donn’s mother passed away shortly before we returned home and his sister put Mom’s furniture in storage until we were ready to use it. We miss her terribly but love using her things knowing that this too was God’s provision.

Later we learned that God had “gone to prepare a place for us” here in Greenville fifty years earlier. At that time, the owner of this house had added a “mother-in-law’s wing” which accounted for the bedroom, bathroom, laundry room, family room (her living room) on the first floor of an older, two-story home─almost unheard of in this area! (We also discovered that just a few weeks before we returned, the seller had dropped the price $30,000!) In addition, it soon became clear that almost everything God had for us to do was in Greenville!

This is the second time that God has asked us to give all we had, and in both cases as we were obedient, He has gone to prepare a place for us that was beyond anything we could ask or think (Eph. 3:20).   “All I have needed Thy hand hath provided─Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.” (Thomas Chisholm) He is a faithful, amazing God.

Father, help us trust you enough to surrender all we have to you. Enable us to believe You are faithful. Amen.