One of the readings at church last Sunday was “all things work together for good…” (Romans 8:28). It is a reassuring statement from a wonderfully victorious and reassuring passage but it still turns out to be hard to remember when faced with the vicissitudes of daily life. Of course, while people do suffer all sorts of difficult trials, many of those troubles boil down to not getting what we want as soon as we want it.
The process of selling our flat is one instance that is still fresh in my mind. In my ideal plans it would have been snapped up for a good price within a couple of weeks of hitting the market or perhaps early in the new year at the latest. Instead, we’ve had about eight months to cultivate the virtue of patience, although we are now in the relatively comfortable post-exchange run up to completion.
Knowing what I know now though, I can look back and see a possible good reason for slow progress on sale of house. We are excited about the opportunity to join the intentional community at House244; if we’d sold when we wanted and then found the kind of place we had in mind, we would have been locked into the responsibility of a new house and the community option may not even have arisen.
Sometimes delay is the path to the blessing we need even if it is not the realisation of what we thought we wanted.
Want to add something? Please join the conversation about this posting (nb. Yahoo! account required to log into Flickr).