There are so many hurting people out there.  If you are going through a tough time right now, please know that you are not alone.  You are also not without hope (although at times I know it feels like it).  God has a plan for your life, and that is what I want to talk about today.  I am inspired to share on this topic because I have been contacted privately by several people in very dire circumstances lately, and while my life is in a good place right now, it has not always been this way.  I don’t know if I am called to help people through my own journey or not, but there was a long hard road I walked that led me to inspired living and to this blog. I am trying to be braver about sharing more of my story, because I want to help give others hope that you CAN have a beautiful life in the midst of challenges.

This verse became my mantra about 6 years ago when I was feeling hopeless. I had just turned 30 and Matt and I were newly engaged. I lived in a small bedroom at home with my parents at the time, he rented a small upper level apartment in a not so nice house down the road. We were thinking about our future and where we would live once married. Because of the personal challenges I had, I knew I didn’t want to move around a lot. It felt too overwhelming to me to try to move in to his tiny apartment temporarily, and then have to move again later when we found a house. I had a vision of what kind of home I wanted, and I had a stipulation that it pretty much had to be in the same neighborhood I grew up in. I loved it here, it felt safe and doable to me. It was my home.

This is the backstory to how the above verse, Jeremiah 29:11, became my mantra and why I sunk into a sort of hopeless depression. I will be telling this story in parts, because there is a lot to it. From not understanding God’s plan and being depressed about my life, to receiving God’s miracles and finally seeing His plan revealed to me 2 years later!

The house across the street from my parents had been on the market for a long time. It was a 3400 square ft. home, a home I had been in as a young girl. A home an artist had lived in. A home I had always admired in our neighborhood. It was originally listed at about 100,000 over our budget, and I would have never in a million years even considered we could live in a house like that. So, it never crossed my mind.

One day one of my healer friends that I was working on my challenges with, encouraged me to walk over there and pick up a flyer for that house. I was like are you nuts?!! We can’t ever have a home like that. We can’t afford it. She said to me, “Well, you never know what’s possible.” I see now what she was doing. She was trying to get me to step out of my comfort zone and stretch my vision. Permission to dream about my future. So I awkwardly walked over there feeling silly, and got a flyer.

Much to my surprise, that house had dropped $50,000 in price! It was still out of our budget, but she had me curious. For the first time, I was starting to see possibility. I kept an eye on that house for awhile, just for the fun of it, and it eventually dropped another several thousand in price, to where it was almost in our price range. Suddenly, something so IMpossible, became POSSIBLE!

I still did not act. I was too scared to step out of my comfort zone. Fear used to freeze me up a lot more in those days.

But then God gave me a dream…

In this dream I was given a sense of urgency to act NOW. In real life, this house sat empty on the market for 2 years, and had no offers on it (the older couple who had lived there had passed away). This was when the economy was bad and the housing had become much cheaper. So the house kept lowering in price, as it would not sell. In this dream though , there was another older couple who had made a bid and I was in a bidding war with them. I was given the exact amount they bid, and then the exact amount I was bidding in this dream. I felt this real sense of urgency to act because I was going to lose the house if I didn’t. The dream ended before it was revealed who got the house.

That was just the shot in the arm I needed to face my fear and call a realtor for the first time to see about getting this “dream home” that I had previously felt ridiculous picking up a flyer for. I obeyed, and immediately called a realtor when I woke up. She had said there didn’t seem to be any offers on the house at that time, and we set an appointment to go look at it right away. What happened next led me to feeling angry with God and sinking into a depression…

* Stay tuned for the next installment of this story of hopelessness to miracles!

Much love,

Rebekah

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