How it started:
In 2013 we were living in a rented house in Salem, IN when we felt like the Lord wanted us to move back to Louisville to be closer to the church. We had wanted a house of our own for a long time but had never been able to get one based on our income and poor credit history. At the time I was working as a charge nurse at a Louisville inpatient facility (about $55,000 per year) and my husband was working as a manager for a major retailer (around $35,000 per year).
My faith for finances had been growing but it wasn’t what I would have considered strong. I was faithful in the tithe and often gave if I felt the Lord leading. My husband was less convinced. He had some past experiences which left him with negative opinions about giving in general although he was on board for tithe. He also felt very strongly about ministers who asked people to give until it hurts or when the people clearly couldn’t afford it. He felt it was wrong and it used to make him angry. He struggled with belief in using faith for finances in general. That’s not to say my husband isn’t generous. He has a tender heart for those in need. But he was distrustful of most people when it came to money and was always looking for “the scam”. If it seemed too good to be true, it probably was. And he worried about money. A lot.
We had been looking at a house in Louisville that we could purchase on a “rent to own” basis via contract for deed and we were in the process of getting the house inspected and appraised. We moved in with my in-laws in fall 2013 for what we had expected to be less than 4 months. We would be there for over a year. In November 2013 the woman who owned the house changed her mind completely and decided she did not want to do contract for deed after all. We were stuck at my in-laws’ and left to start all over again looking for a home to buy contract for deed because we believed that was the only way we could get a house based on our credit history.
During this time I began to seek God about His Word on finances and faith. One of the main things I was faced with was the many teachings I had heard on financial prosperity. There were so many that taught “5 steps to divine financial prosperity” or 7 steps or 10 ways. Also there were teachings on “5 ways we hinder the financial blessings of God”. It seemed to me that we could follow all the right steps but then say the wrong thing and just lose it all. It was confusing and frustrating and I couldn’t help thinking that this doesn’t jive with what I know about God’s character. Because I had a relationship with God and I knew what He was about. He isn’t the torturer. He doesn’t play games and faith is simple. God can’t be tricked or manipulated. So I started over. I decided that since I couldn’t make heads or tails of the teachings I had heard, that I would start studying this on my own.
Hebrews 11: 1-6 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” I started with this. I wanted to begin with the definition of faith. Verse 6 says “it’s impossible to please God without faith. And he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him”. HIM. Not what He can provide, but HIM. Faith is about your relationship with God. Always has been. After all, how can you know if someone will like something or how they will respond if you don’t know them? If someone comes along and tells you something about someone you know well, you will be able to tell instantly if it “sounds like them” or not. Same with God. Faith begins where the will of God is known. The biggest argument to believing for things in the natural like a house or a car is not knowing whether it is God’s will. I so wanted to please God. This is what made all the difference. I had wanted a house for my family for years, but it was to please me. To make me feel like a good Mom. To make me look good to my family and my in laws.
John 14:14 says “If you ask anything in My Name”. There are no disclaimers or conditions here. Anything.
Luke 11:11 says “What father among you….” Jesus says clearly that a good Father knows how to give good gifts. Of course God wants us blessed. He’s a good Father. I established that God wanted my family to have a nice house to live in. So I started to search out reasons that may explain why we still didn’t.
James 1:6 says “Nothing wavering”. Double mindedness will keep you from receiving ANYTHING from the Lord. I looked it up. Being double minded means holding two beliefs at once that are opposite of each other. One is based on carnal, natural things and the other is based on spiritual, eternal truths. In other words, you have to make a clear choice. God doesn’t need an escape route or a plan B. If you need a way of escape, He has already provided one. In fact the way of escape He provides, is the one to escape temptation!
James 4:2-3 says “You have not because you ask not and you ask and do not receive because you ask to consume it upon your own lusts”. I struggled with this. Of course if I ask for a house, it’s for me. I couldn’t understand how my asking God for a house wasn’t for me. It would be MY family who lived in it. So I asked God to show me. But something that is consumed is used and then gone. Consuming something upon your own lusts has to do with motives. I had to do some self-examination. Was there pride in believing God for the house? I knew so many people who wanted a house, a car, a job, etc. What was my reason for wanting to be a “successful believer” in the past? I realized I had some wrong motives before that prevented me. There were some people I wanted to prove myself to in the past. Also my lack of understanding about faith had been a factor. This time my faith was about my relationship with God and my desire to please Him. And as I said before, it made all the difference. This will never be consumed and I share this story with everyone I have opportunity to share it with.
Romans 4. Abraham believed God. He did not consider the deadness of his own body nor the deadness of Sarah’s womb. He didn’t CONSIDER it. It wasn’t a factor in his choice to believe God. He had God’s Word and it was enough. This spoke volumes to me. He SAW his body every day. He knew he was a hundred years old. He knew Sarah was way past child-bearing age. He just didn’t CONSIDER those facts into evidence. They weren’t bigger than God’s Word.
As a step of faith, we went to a realtor who we knew was a Christian in January and asked him to take us to look at a couple of houses in the areas we were hoping to live. At that time we had no pre-approved loan and our realtor clearly had no faith for what he considered a waste of time in showing us houses. He did show us a house or two but was very negative and it was a bit discouraging. We agreed to try to get approved through his realty agency but were denied based on our credit history. We decide to work on our credit armed with the goal of the specific credit score we needed to reach for approval. It felt good to have a goal. We began working on our credit—paying off things as we could since we had a little extra money now that we were not paying rent.
We had been married for 20 years and had accrued a lot of bad debt and made plenty of bad financial decisions. Most things (utilities, etc) had been placed in my name over the years because I was the one who usually set everything up. This meant that anytime we were unable to pay or fell behind, the negative balances reflected on my credit rather than my husband’s. His credit was therefore better than mine, but it still was not stellar. We were not quick to pay medical bills–something we had plenty of because of our oldest son’s skull surgery, club foot repairs, and near amputation of one finger. I had given birth three times, was in a serious car accident, and had undergone a hysterectomy. The kids had multiple trips to the ER for injuries occurring due to roughhousing and just playing in general. The boys had had 2 trips to the ER for stitches each, our daughter had one ER trip for stitches from a friend’s dog and one for a broken leg sustained on the trampoline. Two of the kids had tonsils and adenoids removed and turbinates reduced, and one had tubes in her ears. My husband had some minor back problems over the years and one minor surgery but otherwise very little in the way of health issues. Regardless, most of our debt was in the form of unpaid medical bills with a couple of defaulted credit cards thrown in. There was also at least one legal matter. I began writing letters requesting forgiveness of debts to our creditors for large sums and paying off the smaller ones.
On February 17, 2014 I went to work and was told—along with my co-workers—that the hospital was closing our unit in 30 days and that most of us would be out of work. Only a handful would stay and work in the main hospital. I would be unemployed in 30 days’ time. At that time I was an ASN prepared RN with 7 years of experience and felt that at least I had a month to find a new job. As it turned out, it would take me 6 months to find something else. All of the newly graduated nurses would be looking for work as I was finishing my time at my current job. These nurses would be cheaper and many of them would have their BSN degree. This is when I discovered that the ASN prepared RN was being put aside with the LPN. There were just no jobs unless the ASN RN was at least in school to obtain her BSN. From March 17th to the end of August I collected unemployment while going to school and homeschooling our youngest.
We continued to try to work on our credit and continued to be faithful in the tithe throughout the year in spite of our significantly decreased income. This was something I knew in my heart to be important to sanctify our income and my husband was in agreement with this.
The faith walk:
I had decided that God was God or He was not. I decided that using faith had a lot to do with how faith was fed and with what the soul was being fed. I recognized that I had more faith for finances that for medical concerns and felt that it had to do with the amount of medical knowledge I possessed. When praying for others, my faith for physical healing was strong as was the anointing, but in praying for my own physical health it seemed I had more head knowledge about physical health than I did Bible knowledge.
I decided that I was going to take God at His Word because I wanted to. I wanted to believe God for this house because it would mean that I knew God well enough to trust Him for it. I remember telling the Lord “I want to believe You for this house. I don’t want to doubt that you can or that you will”. I remember wanting so much to prove God true to His Word. Not because God needed me to prove anything for Him, but because I knew that getting this house by faith was a matter of my relationship with Him. If my children want or need something, I never want them to think they have any reason to doubt my willingness to provide. I knew God COULD. I wanted to know God WOULD. In those months, I sought God, not the house. Getting the house became secondary to my ability to be near enough to God to trust Him for the answer and for His provision. The victory was in my belief that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
When the contract for deed didn’t go through, I wondered. Then when I lost my job in March I thanked God that I didn’t have a large house payment to keep up while I went to school and looked for work. But I still wondered. By this time I had decided to trust God and I hunkered down into His Word and spent time in prayer. I asked for the faith I needed. This is Biblical. Ephesians 2:8 “for it is by grace you were saved through faith, that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God”. Even the faith it takes us to admit we are sinners does not come from us! It is the GIFT OF GOD!! I remembered that God’s plan of redemption does not depend on us doing everything right. In fact we have only two things to get right—we have to believe unto righteousness with our hearts using the faith God gives and we have to confess with our mouths unto salvation. The disciples told Jesus, “we believe! Help us in our unbelief”. Asking for more faith is biblical. Lord, I want to serve you. I want to believe you. Help me do that!
God answered my prayer for faith. He took me to the story of Peter walking on water and then getting afraid because of the wind and waves. Then he said “Peter was a fisherman. His knowledge and experience about wind and waves was based on what wind and waves can do to a boat, not a man walking on water.” God showed me that Peter was afraid because He didn’t recognize the miracle he was already living. God said “Wind and waves have nothing to do with walking on water”. From then on, I looked at my circumstances differently. Whatever the natural circumstances were, I was already walking on water because I was already living by faith. “the just shall live by faith” “walk by faith and not by sight”. This does not mean to close your eyes or to deny what you see, but to trust God’s Word more than what your natural eyes see. After all, what’s a little wind and waves when you’re already walking on water? The rules are all broken when the miraculous occurs. Miracles don’t follow natural laws. That’s what makes them miracles. If we live every day as a miracle, what wind and waves could stop us? Only those we believe. This was my premise. I was going to move forward through the process of believing God for a job AND for a house at the same time and I was NOT going to look to my natural circumstances to tell me how to believe. I was not going to CONSIDER them. I began by believing God not just for a job, but for THE job. We talked about what I wanted in a job, and I didn’t apply to any position that didn’t fill the bill.
The Events:
AUGUST 2014: I had applied as a manager at a home health agency. This would be a desk job that would not require me to go out on patient visits which is what I was trying to avoid. I wanted to avoid the additional hours of documentation that I would have to add to my home health day and the on-call that would be inevitable. I wanted more time at home, better pay, and less paperwork. I had already done the home health thing and didn’t want to do it again. The company had an open position for a home health nurse, but I deliberately avoided applying for it. When I went for the manager interview, however, the position had already been decided unknown to me for another person and they offered me the home health nurse position. I asked them not to offer it to me and told them I did not want to do that, but they offered it to me anyway and I had to take the job. I could not continue to collect unemployment if I had a good job offer on the table. So, even though it wasn’t what I wanted, I took the position. I talked about this to the Lord who knew I didn’t want the job and He encouraged me to keep looking.
I continued to apply for jobs I wanted and was getting callbacks. While my background check was going through, I went to interview at the job I REALLY wanted along with another position which was similar at a different company. In the end, the two jobs had a bidding war and I was able to take the job I wanted at an even higher salary. I started working at THE job August 24, 2014. I would work there for 5 years and the job would be a tremendous blessing to me and my whole family.
September 2014: We had continued to tithe and work on our credit all year and decided to apply again to the realty company for our mortgage. We were again denied. So I asked the Lord about it. The Lord said “If you got a diagnosis from a doctor that you didn’t like, you’d get a second opinion wouldn’t you?” and I said “yes, Lord. I would.” He said, “apply somewhere else”. So I did. I applied online to a lender and two days later was talking to a loan officer by the name of Zach. Zach took all our information and asked me if we had a down payment. We did not. In fact we had exactly $0 in savings. ZERO dollars. Now, I’m not one of these people that just goes around saying stuff like I’m about to share, but I felt the prompting of the Holy Ghost, and I said—“Well Zach, we are believing God to provide that”. The phone went completely silent. Zach stammered a little and said, “Well Tonya I’m a Christian too, but we’re going to need something more. Do you have any relatives that you’d be able to get the money from?” And thinking of my heavenly Father and knowing that my earthly dad had it even if I had no intention of asking him for it, I said “yes. Don’t worry about it. It’ll be there”. Zach ran the numbers and said “I think we can work with you.” We were pre-approved. And that was miracle #1.
Zach set us up with a realtor from Elizabethtown who they worked with in order to help us find a house. Now, I’ve already told you that my husband was not an especially trusting fellow and he was worried about involving a realtor because he didn’t want to get pressured into buying a house or paying more money for a house that he wasn’t completely comfortable with. He knew they all work on commission and figured we’d be pressured to buy. All this time I had been trusting God with my husband because I needed him to not be a barrier to getting a house due to unbelief or to fear or whatever. I had been asking the Lord every step to help my husband to be on board. He was nervous about being in debt so much and about such a large purchase. When we got the name of our realtor, it sounded familiar to my husband. As it turned out, Charles was a pastor in Elizabethtown who was also a full time realtor, and a childhood friend of my husband’s. Miracle #2.
Charles told us to do some searching and made some suggestions about areas in our price range. I went online to a realty search site and the Lord directed me to put in everything I wanted in a house, including the price range. I put in how many bedrooms I wanted, whether I wanted a basement, garage, square feet—all of it. And came up with three houses I wanted to see. So we arranged to meet Charles at the first house. He was closer to it and got there first while we were stuck in traffic. He called us to tell us not to come. Someone had stolen the copper pipes out of the walls and as it wasn’t livable it didn’t fulfill the basic criteria for the loan. We met him instead at the second house. It wasn’t bad, but wasn’t a dream home either. House three was the least expensive but it was huge. With the basement included it was 3000 square feet. It needed work but it was all cosmetic. I could see us in that house. The price was $124, 900 and Charles told us it was a foreclosure, something we didn’t know. He felt we could offer 112, 500 since it was bank owned, and reduce our monthly payment significantly. This sounded good to my husband and he really wanted to do that. He was worried about a high monthly payment. We made the offer. Charles called us the next day with the news that the seller said no to our offer. Not even a counter offer. Just no. He suggested we offer the asking price and then ask for closing costs to free up some cash up front. My husband was anxious and this isn’t want he wanted, but he agreed because I told Him God would take care of us. Two days went by and I got a call from Charles who said that he was sorry it was taking so long but that the seller hadn’t received our offer yet because their realty agent’s computer was down. Two days later I got another call from Charles. He said “do you want the good news or the bad news?”. I told him to give me the bad news. He said “well the seller’s agent’s computer is still down so they still don’t have our offer.” I asked him for the good news. He said, “While we were waiting, the seller dropped the price to $112,500”. Miracle #3.
We still didn’t have a down payment. It was going to take a while for all the other stuff the banks and realtors had to work out, but we still had to have a down payment and soon. For first time homebuyers in KY, that meant 10% of the price of the home. One day as I was leaving for work I saw a large envelope from an old employer of my husband’s. When I opened it, it was a notice that he had a pension from working at the place and needed to claim it. According to the paperwork, it was a limited time offer. From what I read, it looked like it would provide something like $80 per month for a number of years. I was on my way out for work, so I couldn’t spend a lot of time on it, but the Lord nudged me to give it to my husband and have him call to find out if there was a lump sum option so that we could get the pension all at once. I left the envelope and asked him to call that morning before he went to work. A couple of hours later my husband called me. He was clearly overwhelmed. His voice was shaking and he was stammering. All he said was “$15, 000”. When he could speak more he told me that they’d have to take out a couple thousand dollars in taxes, but that it would be enough for our down payment. We were both just overcome with God’s goodness and I practically did a jig in the middle of my work day. I went out to the lobby to call Zach. He was amazed. “Are you kidding me?!” was all he could say. He said, “I’ve been telling my wife about you guys!” Miracle #4.
There is a lot that goes into the buying of a house. The lending company wants to see your bank statements for the past year, wants explanations for all kinds of expenditures, deposits, everything. You don’t always know what they are looking for and sometimes they ask for things that make you wonder why. At any point the deal could fail because of something in your history that couldn’t be explained satisfactorily. One such thing came to the attention of our lender and Zach let me know it could be a deal breaker. I was out of town for work and was in my hotel room alone. I could feel the fear rising and I sought the Lord. I wanted to know if my faith was still standing. I reached into the spirit and could feel the beams of that house. The Lord took me into that so I could know that even though I felt fear, my faith was still solid. It was just wind and waves. So I submitted our reply to the bank and rested in the Lord. Miracle #5.
We closed on our house on December 31, 2014 with exceedingly, abundantly above all we could ask or think. We had a house with more square footage than we asked for, with plenty of room at a terrific price, but it wasn’t the prize. My husband is now the first of us to make sure tithe has been paid and reminds me at times. He never now considers waiting to pay tithe to take care of something else. Tithe is a priority to him and he takes our giving seriously. This is a long story, but the whole story is necessary to see the prize. I focused my faith on the house, but what I got in return was a closer relationship with the Lord and a husband who is a partner in faith with our finances. There is NO greater blessing. I wasn’t even looking for that, but God saw to it. He brought my husband along to show him that God doesn’t only answer my prayers, but his. I could have believed God for the payment for the 124,900, but God wouldn’t leave my husband behind. He used my husband’s former job and his former friend. Before this, my husband had some crazy notion that I was the one who’s prayers God answered. Not so, and he doesn’t think that now. Miracle #6.
I learned so much about faith through this journey. I have grown in my faith in every area because of what I experienced and my relationship with God was forever strengthened and solidified. I learned more about faith through this one thing that I had ever before learned through sermons. God’s relationship with us is THE most important thing. There is NOTHING greater. We only ask amiss when we ask for things for the purpose of consuming. This journey wasn’t taken because of a house. It was taken because I was tired of not knowing that I could trust the God I serve to keep His Word. I wanted to prove God. I knew He was who He said He was and I was tired of hearing excuses made for Him by people who just didn’t have the faith to believe Him. God doesn’t need us to make excuses for Him. I am forever changed by this journey and every time I revisit it by sharing it with another person I am in awe anew. Miracle #7 is ongoing.
There is no aspect of this story that isn’t completely miraculous. Everything operated outside natural expectations and conditions. Those weren’t CONSIDERED. God is so faithful.