Where We'll Be Living

I sent this email to some friends earlier today, and then I thought, Hey, I should post this on our blog! I wrote the email in a hurry, so the punctuation has some issues, and I thought I should apologize since I'm going to be an English teacher and all! Oh well, you'll get the main point. :)

dan and i went to upland on thursday to look at apartments and meet my cooperating teacher, and we prayed from the beginning that God would show us where to live. we had three apartment buildings and one house to look at. we liked all the apartments and and the house was our last stop. the people who own the house had sent us pictures the night before, and we fell in love with it right away, but i thought, There is no way we can afford to rent a house. While we were looking at the pictures though, I asked Dan how much he would be willing to pay to live there, and he said $450. They were asking for $700 in the email but said the price was negotiable if we did yard work, etc.

So we stopped at the house, and LOVED IT, but told Jeff (the owner), "We're just looking - we can't afford this." He then went out to say, "Well, we were going to rent it to teh last people for $450 if they did yard work." At this point, I started nudging Dan and cheesy smiling, but he just thought I was excited about the house! In the car on the way home, I pointed out the "coincidence" to Dan and he hadn't even thought of it!

Anyway, we talked to Jeff about the possibility of an even lower price, and he said he wanted to talk to his wife about it. (Aside - Jeff and Megan are going to be hall directors next year, which is why they're renting out their house.) They (well, we didn't meet his wife yet but from what he told us) seem really great; their philosophy about life and hospitality is very similar to ours in terms of not being in it for the money but wanting to bless people.So Dan and I left saying we would talk to him the next day once he talked to his wife and also figured out how much utilities would be. On the car ride home, Dan and I talked about why we would want a house over an apartment, andwe both agreed that our main motivation would be so that we can have people over (family, friends) and even have room to house someone in need if that situation would happen. We then prayed and asked God that if this was something we should do, that when we talked to our parents (presenting all of our housing options adn reasoning), they would agree that the house was the way to go.I was pretty nervous about this, but I felt it was the right way to go.

So we talked to my parents, and they basically said we should go for the house, that it was a great deal and our reasoning was sound. Dan talked to his parents the next day, and they agreed that we should go for teh house. So Dan talked to Jeff, and Jeff said that we could rent the house for $400 for the first 10 months and then go from there! With utilities, it will be about $550-600 a month! Praise God! We feel so blessed by this and are excited to see how God can use us to be a blessing to others in Upland!