We met up with Paul Tuesday afternoon and set a date (Feb. 18) for Steven to start, meaning we would hope to spend the week before that on the move. The timeline seemed perfect because that would give us 30 days to make an offer on a house and get everything finalized there. We spent the rest of the day looking at houses, and found two that we liked pretty well. There were two more that we couldn't look at until Wednesday, so we decided to stay another night so that we could look at all the houses before making an offer.
Wednesday started off rough because Steven and I liked different houses. I liked one we went to Tuesday (Vandalia house),
while he liked the one we had just seen that morning (Wickliffe).
We were both pretty much set on "our" house and really weren't in any position to be making an offer on either of them! It was hard on me because I had always envisioned us both falling in love with the SAME house- I knew that whoever didn't "get their way" would always half-way have it in the back of their mind, "what if we had bought MY house..."
We went back to the Vandalia house so I could do my best to persuade Steven that THIS was the house we needed! ha! On the way, we got a text from Paul that we can't pull the trigger and needed to get together with him ASAP. After a quick run-through of the house, we met him at the church where he explained to us that they no longer are able to hire Steven in the time-frame we had discussed, and they don't know if they will be able to hire him at all. He also couldn't tell us a time-line of when to expect any more answers and told us not to wait for them if we are offered a different position somewhere else. We were DEVASTATED. After about an hour, we left and headed back to Springfield with no house, no job, no nothing.
Basically, it was nothing against Steven. Paul said he still likes Steven and if he is able to offer the job to someone, it will be him. But, the church is in a transition stage right now, in that their former pastor was shot and killed a year ago. They are now in the process of hiring their interim pastor, to be full-time. They made that commitment to him last year, and with the commitment, the hiring comittee told him that the church would not hire any new personell until they were under his full-time leadership (which begins February 1). Paul was not aware of this when he started the interview process with Steven, and just found out about it Wednesday night when he was wondering why there was such a delay getting Steven's contract ready. So ultimately, Paul had to honor the new pastor's wishes of being involved in the hiring decisions.
We still don't know why this happened... Maybe they will be able to hire him in February and there will be a house then that we will both agree on and God just wanted us to wait on that? Or maybe Maryville isn't where He wants us at all? We have been praying all this time that God would open the right doors and close the wrong ones so it is obvious to us where He wants us. So I don't understand why the doors kept opening and opening and working PERFECTLY for Maryville, all to be slammed shut with a little tiny crack still open- only enough to give us hope of a future job there.
We are now back at square one- back to the interview process with a few different churches. Except now I don't have school and it is the slow time of the year at the Tower Club so I really don't think it would be worth it to confine myself to there.
We know that God has a plan. We know that everything will be SO worth it when we are where God has for us. We know that we will look back on this as a time when God was at work in our lives. We will be able to use this experience as our testimony and also as an avenue to relate to others who are in a "waiting" time of their life. We know that "He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it" and that God WILL bring us the right thing at HIS timing.
It's just hard to wait.
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