Answered Prayers

It was a long and winding road, but one that finally-- after a longer journey than seemed possible-- led to a happy ending.

After five-and-a-half years of trying, we finally have a contract to sell the house in St. Louis we left in 2007!

I repeat: WE ARE FINALLY SELLING OUR FLIPPING HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This changes everything. 

It marks the end of a very long walk in the desert.  It's the end of:

Five-and-a-half years of unanswered prayers, and wondering where God was in my life.  Sixty-five straight months of making two house payments, while only living in one.  298 consecutive weeks where I saw something fun happening the upcoming weekend but couldn't afford to do it and dreamed of the day when I could.  2008 nights in a row of going to bed with a giant unresolved problem on my hands, and nothing I could do to fix it.

The worst part of owning two houses isn't the wasted money, though, it's the chains the situation puts around your life.  There's a constant uncertainty about everything. 

You can't visit distant friends and relatives very often, because you never know when you might need that airfare money to go toward closing.  There are constant maintenance needs that you don't even know about until they've mushroomed into something huge, and the ever-looming threat of a break-in.

We had three. 

You can't make any long-term plans whatsoever, because you haven't the faintest idea what life is going to look like a few months down the road.

It's a never-ending source of administrative headaches, from having to supervise repairmen from long-distance, to remembering to pay two sets of bills every month, to pleading with heartless insurance companies about writing a policy for a vacant house that's been broken into three times. 

All that is ending now. 

The house is selling, the extra bills are disappearing, and soon, whatever else goes wrong five hours away won't be our problem. 

But that isn't even the best news I've received in the last eight days. 

As I've noted here before, it was March 15th of this year when we heard that our former tenant at that St. Louis house was not going to buy it after all, and, in fact was breaking her lease and moving out.

But that wasn't the worst news of my day--far from it.  

About two hours earlier, I listened as an emotionless doctor casually told my brother and his wife that he had a 48 percent chance of beating cancer and still being alive in five years.

It doesn't make sense, and my brother's issues were a million times worse, but the two problems had sort of been spiritually linked in my mind from that day forward, and I rarely prayed for one without the other.

After his appointment, my brother endured 12 grueling sessions of chemotherapy.  His treatments ended at the end of the summer, but the doctors wanted to wait a couple months after to see if the treatment had been effective, or if the cancer had returned. 

On Monday of last week, he checked out clear.  No sign of cancer whatsoever. 

It was late afternoon of the day before the results came, when my realtor called.  The last few showings hadn't gone well, so I assumed he was calling with yet another maintenance issue.  My wife even said that theory out loud when I announced who was calling. 

Instead, the realtor was calling to say that a woman had offered to buy our house on the spot upon her first viewing of the house.  And somehow, at that moment, I knew then that my brother was going to be just fine.

As I told a close friend today, it's funny how God seems to disappear for the longest time, only to beat you over the head with reminders of his presence at some point later on. In my case, God waited much longer than I would have liked to answer my two defining prayers, but when he did, he answered both of them at the same time. 

I can't prove that God made all things new in my life in at once to show that he never deserted me when it all went South at the same time back in March.  I don't believe in easy answer to complicated questions, nor do I pray to a Cosmic Vending Machine who answers prayers according to a specific formula or even in ways we are meant to understand.

But when I think about how the two defining problems that have shaped my 2012 were solved at the same time, and on the weekend after I'd come to the place of being able to write a blog about being thankful for life notwithstanding its difficulties, I can't help but shake my head and wonder how things look from the other side of Heaven.