So what causes a working middle class couple to walk away from a 3 bedroom house in "old town Conway" and move to a 2 bedroom, trailer in much need of attention and TLC? Simple answer...The Gospel. Now I know that sounds uber-spiritual, but that's actually our motivation and the story is pretty awesome to be honest. It started about 6 months ago when we started looking at other houses in the city because ours was too much to handle and we wanted to down size some and cut the budget a bit. Now, to be honest the Lord had been dealing with my (Gage's) heart a bit in this area after reading Radical Together by David Platt. And I know what your thinking, typical American evangelical feels guilty about his possessions so he is going to dream about selling them all in order to right the wrong of his excess living. Not exactly...I mean I do think we have way more than we need and often times struggle with wanting more all though I don't need any of it. But the truth is, I felt the Lord pressing on me that our family needed to reconsider our position in life and reevaluate what we were doing with the things God had given us.
We started shopping around for the house we probably should have bought to begin with and found a few very promising prospects. There are hundreds of houses sold every day in the city and it really is a buyer's market right now. Still, when we crunched the numbers, talked and prayed, it was as if we were trying to force this to happen as opposed to this landing in our lap the way God provided for us with the house we are currently in. So, with a lot of uncertainty and confusion I left for a week to attend a conference called Together For the Gospel in Louisville, KY.
As we landed in Louisville, me and several pastor friends from Conway settled in for the week at one of the pastor's parents house. This was going to be a great time to rest, pray, and listen to what God had to say in regards to my life and answer some questions that I had carried to Louisville with me. I had no idea that God had answers but not to the questions I had been asking....I shared with my friends the burdens on my heart and spent a lot of time silent-hoping to hear from the King. And hear I did....Jesus began to speak to my heart regarding my giving, my stewardship, my viewpoint on those with less than me and my overall role as leader of my family and pastor in South Oakwood. I began to re-evaluate this downsize plan of ours and spent the first couple of nights sharing my thoughts with Katie over the phone. Truth is, I had fallen in love with the American Dream and these new houses were nothing but a highway to bigger, nicer, better, more comfortable place. But none of them had any ounce of Gospel focus at all. If I'm honest, the only focus in the decisions so far was me. So I shared with my wife that maybe we didn't need to buy again, maybe we could rent, I mean honestly who cares what the "standard" is, we need to be faithful. We both agreed. And then the Lord took a sharp left as the driver of our life....
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