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Bursting with Thankfulness Part 2

Luke got a new job!!!!

Now most of you know Luke LOVES Apple and he has LOVED working for them for the last 5 1/2 years, but it is extremely difficult to never know your schedule more than 3 weeks in advance and not have nights or weekends off. I know there are tons of people that have to do just that and let’s just take a second to recognize their struggle………………………… IT IS SO HARD! We haven’t ever gotten to spend weekends together, go on trips, been in a bible study together, gone to church regularly, had a regular date night, Luke has missed so many celebrations for people we love, and the list just goes on and on. It has been hard on us as a couple, on me, our family and friends, and it has been especially hard on Luke. SO this is HUGE news for us!!!

The funny thing is, we weren’t looking… in the past Luke has looked and just not found where God was leading him and he recently went back to school and I thought okay, well I am going to have to deal with this for the next few years, but God (I love those two words!) had other plans. I saw a friend posted a job opening at his company and sent it to Luke. It was maybe a week to two week process and I didn’t realize this until a couple days ago, but I was praying a week or so before the job posting that God would find a way for us to go to church together consistently, be in a bible study, have date nights, and that Luke would be able to engage with godly men (he is often cut off from serving and such activities at church because of his schedule). And God just straight up answered that prayer!!!! Luke is now working for Kotman Technology as a Network Engineer, 8am-5pm, Monday-Friday! So if you or your business need tech support give them a call! I am so proud of Luke and so amazed at how awesome God is!

I have felt like we were in a season of waiting for so long…years…and God has just been so faithful in that waiting and now He is showing us some of what we have been waiting for!

And let me just tell you, it has been SO worth the wait!!!! In the last two weeks of Luke working at Kotman Technology, our lives have been drastically different…we have gone to church together, gone out of town together, spent evenings together, hung out with family and friends at NORMAL hours, had many date nights, and Luke has just been so ridiculously sweet to me!!! He has had time and energy to help me prepare for starting school, lovingly dealt with crazy going back-to-school BaCall, and just been sweet and nice. It has been such a blessing!!! I am just beyond thankful and every time I think about it I just get all teary, oh yeah he’s been sweetly dealing with super emotional me too!

That concludes this episode of WOW GOD WOW! Thanks for tuning in and I am sure we will be back proclaiming His faithfulness soon, whether in more exciting news or come what may He is good!

 

PS Update on my friend Allison, she had her baby 10 weeks early. His name is Judah and he is doing very well! Thank you for all your prayers! Please keep praying as she is now doing the more extreme chemo and Judah is still growing and developing.

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Bursting with Thankfulness Part 1

For at least a month or two now I have been bubbling over with gratitude and just really wanting to share what God has been doing in Luke’s and my lives, but we just weren’t ready to share and to be honest the story was still unfolding. Well the time has finally arrived!!!

….And now all of you that know me think I am announcing I’m pregnant! LOL well I am NOT prego and I have found that every time I tell anyone that I have good, exciting, or any kind of positive news people assume the answer is pregnant. We aren’t quite there yet folks and won’t be for quite a while. So just assume for now that any news I share is not that news and still be excited…because let’s be real, most people have seemed a little disappointed when it isn’t pregnant and that makes me sad because our news is still so exciting to us and a really big deal to us and speaks of God’s graciousness and really just want you to be excited too because God is just super cool! Now I’m done with my pregnancy rant 😉

Anyway, so in June we paid off our $9,300 student loan (WHOOHHOOO! Still so happy about that!) and God totally came through in the money department on that loan. See the last loan that we paid off, we were so excited to pay it off that we used part of our emergency fund and basically all the money we had to our name and then the next month we paid our emergency fund back. Well this time we didn’t need to do that, God was so awesome… we were short $300 or so we thought, it turned out we were really short a little more, but I’ll come back to that… randomly my mom said she wanted to give us some money. My mom is a super generous person and is always buying people things and clothes and such, but she doesn’t usually say here’s some money randomly. So I asked why and she said I want to give you $300 for student loans and I almost cried. I knew from our bi-monthly budget meeting that we needed that exact amount!!! Knowing it was God using my mom to provide I thanked her and Him and graciously accepted, I’m hoping it was graciously that I accepted :/. That was the first cool thing, then we realized we were actually short a little more than we thought and Luke, who always seems to trust that God has us covered, was like don’t worry it will all work out. That always makes me grumpy… how does he trust so well?!?!?! And he was of course right and randomly his paycheck was bigger than normal and we had the perfect amount to pay off the loan! God just showing His faithfulness to me again and saying come on BaCall you can trust me and I must say my trust is definitely growing!

THEN something even cooler happened! Luke and I have been looking at houses for a LONG time. Not super seriously at first, but we have gone to open houses every chance we got and we also went to look at any model home we got the chance to look at for the last year, just to get an idea of what we really wanted and to watch the housing prices while we were paying off student loans. And to be honest I was nervous, we hadn’t found anything we really liked or that we felt was worth its price and worse yet, we started to see prices rising a little more quickly than we had hoped for. Then in April we saw this model home and from the second I walked in I thought, this is it! This is THE house.

Luke is normally the excitable one and he is usually all in once he is excited and I am very rarely excited and almost never all in. We flipped that day, Luke wasn’t excited or all in, which confused me like never before. I felt peace and knew this house was exactly what we had been looking for and even felt like God might be leading us to buy the house, which is a super big deal because well see above…rarely excited, never all in. But Luke said he thought something wasn’t right. WHY oh why is the man always right?!?!? So we moved on, then last month right before we paid off the student loan, we decided to go look at those models again. The exact house we would have bought was sold and the whole neighborhood was just about sold out, especially the model we loved. We asked about another specific lot…see part of the problem has been lot size, we don’t want a tiny yard and there was only one lot left that was a bigger size and was the model we loved… so when we asked about it we were extremely disappointed to hear that it was already spoken for. We gave our name and number anyway and asked to be called if it should happen to become available again. To which we were told that he didn’t think it would fall through, I believe he said he was 95% or more sure that it wouldn’t fall through, but he would give us a call if anything happened. He then proceed to try to sell us on other models and lots…which drastically failed because like I mentioned before rarely excited, never all in.

Now Luke was on board, so we prayed and gave it to God. We both felt like it was in God’s hands. See the previous house or lot I should say, would have closed in September or October and that was just a little too soon for us and our loan paying selves and apparently just wasn’t right for us, plus we wouldn’t have been able to payoff that $9,300 student loan when we did because we would have had to put down a deposit instead. Also the address had 666 in it, which I didn’t find out until later, and I just thought that was another added bonus to not buying the first house because really no one likes that number. Hence Luke being right… Well to our surprise and delight a week or so later, after we paid off the student loan, we got a call from the agent that the house became available. And even more surprising, there wasn’t a lot premium for the bigger lot and he was taking $5,000 off of the price. What?!?!?!? Yeah, can you say blessing… Trust God He has it all worked out. I really couldn’t believe it, I was in shock and thought seriously God??? It was a WOW moment. All that to say we are buying a house and it will be done at the end of November! God’s timing is just incredible. Plus we had money to pay for the deposit because we didn’t spend our emergency fund on the student loan, since God just a week or two before provided us with the exact amount for that loan. We were a little short on the deposit, but had my in-laws offer to loan us the money for a week or so until we got paid and could pay them back, which we did. We have awesome parents in case you couldn’t tell! Everything worked out so seamlessly and God provided in so many ways, it has been absolutely wonderful and guess what… that’s not even the end.