He will Provide!

When Will and I decided we were moving to Fort Portal, we immediately started dreaming about actually having our own house. It has been almost exactly two years since we moved into our own home last- which was our small tukul in South Sudan. Since then, we have been living in the homes of generous missionary friends who are gone for a few months at a time.

In anticipation of moving, we would often dream about what we would want in our own home. We talked about outdoor living spaces and guest quarters for hosting. I dreamed about my own kitchen to cook in and a nursery for our new baby. Anytime I started to think practically about if we could actually find a home in Fort Portal that would fulfill all of these dreams, I found myself cutting off the doubts and thinking, "He will provide". I knew it wasn't worth stressing over and I also knew God saw the desired of our hearts and the longings that have long gone unfulfilled.

Fast forward to this past week. We finally made it to Fort Portal, Uganda and our long-anticipated house hunting began....

and it was extremely disappointing.

We saw house and house and each one didn't even come close to being what we had hoped for. Now, let me just clarify, Will and I have lived in Africa long enough to know that "dream houses" don't exist here (that we could afford at least). We didn't go into the search with lofty goals of house features that we know don't exist here. We wanted simple things, and most of all, just wanted a place that we could make "home".  But still, everything fell way, way short of that hope.

So after seeing 7 very disappointing homes, I started to doubt. My once optimistic view of, "God will provide!" turned into, "maybe we should just pick the best of these bad options because I don't know if anything else will come up...". However, what is great about our God is that even when we doubt and start to lose hope, He can still intervene if we allow him to.

We didn't feel peace about any of the options, so we hit the pause button on the search and hoped something else would come up. Our sweet teammate, Pat, told us that she would drive around with us and see if we found any "for rent" signs or saw anything that could potentially work. During the drive, she took us to a house American missionaries has rented before. As we were touring the house, we finally had the "this feels right" feeling! The house was beautiful! The other homes we saw felt dark and crammed and this had large, open windows and felt vast and homey. As we walked through the house, we both took mental note that it check off everything in our "dream list". The kitchen was large (not AT ALL common here) and beautiful, it had a nice green space outside, plenty of room to host and a great room for a nursery. Our only complaint about the house was that the living was too large. Yes, the only problem with the house was that a room was too big... Oh my, our God is provider! On top of everything, the home was significantly less money each month than the other homes we saw and less than we had budgeted to spend. What a good God!

Kitchen

The "too large" living room that we will somehow find a way to fill :)

For some reason, we didn't commit on the spot. I think it felt too good to be true. However, the more we discussed it, the more we realized this was straight from the Lord. A complete answer to prayers. So, we verbally committed and will sign lease papers this week. We hope to move into the house around September 22. In the meantime, we need to purchase furniture, appliances, etc. from Kampala.

Thank you for everyone who has been praying for us on this house-hunting journey. We are so grateful for the way you have joined us in our prayers and hoped God would provide. Rejoice with us that He did just that! And, this house has a "guest wing", which we are hoping to get a lot of use out of... so we're wide open for visitors :)! We will post more pictures once we move in and get settled after next month.