All in God’s Time, According to God’s Plan
by Toni Blackwood
We relocated to Fort Wayne years ago from another town in Indiana. We would come down and house hunt on the weekends, hoping we would find our next home. During that time, I had the same dream several times. In my dream I was walking up a broad driveway. On my right was a white blank wall that I somehow knew was our home. I would walk past the house to the backyard which appeared to have a lovely view of the countryside with a lake directly behind the house and wandering, light-colored paths. I turned right and walked down one of these paths until I came to a spot where there was an arm of the lake to the right of the path and a huge weeping willow on the left side. Then I would always wake up. Sometimes in my dream I would try to turn my head to see the back of the house so that I would recognize it when I found it but I never got to see it. You see, I was convinced this was the home God wanted us to buy.
Our lovely, historic home sold quickly and, in mid-winter, we had to choose from whatever had been left on the market from the previous summer. We never found my white country house. Instead, we ended up purchasing an ugly, ugly house that we would gradually turn into a welcoming home. It was such dark brick that it was nearly black in color. It was not in the country but on a golf course. There was no lake behind it and the cart paths were black asphalt. The home was so sad that it had sat on the market for four years but it had space and good bones. I stopped having that dream as soon as we purchased this depressing pile of brick. I confess I sat on the kitchen floor shortly after moving in with no one else at home and wept, certain the home we were supposed to buy was out there somewhere and we had just failed to locate it.
Our first summer there, we painted the brick a soft white color, not because of the dream but just because we had to do something to make the house look better. The second summer, the golf course was having drainage problems so one of the measures they took was to extend the lake behind our house. The third summer, having changed to shape and placement of the lake, they had to reconfigure the cart paths. They chose to take up all the black asphalt and replace it with light-colored concrete. In the spring of our fourth summer, the dream long forgotten, I walked up a broad driveway with a white, blank wall on my right side. I walked into the back yard where there was now a beautiful view of the lake, turned right and walked on a light-colored path until I came to a spot where an arm of the lake now extended on the right side of the path and a magnificent weeping willow hugged the left side of the cart path. Déjà vu. I stopped dead and realized that we had purchased the house God had chosen for us. It just had taken four years before I recognized it as such. We would experience good and bad times there and, always, many blessings.
All in God’s time, according to God’s plan.