Open Doors

We were done at three.  We were happy in our house, just the right size for us, in just the right place.  Wouldn’t change a thing.

But sometimes life throws up some unexpected things.  Sometimes God has other ideas.

On 27^th August our fourth baby, and our third little girl, was born.  Avril Faith.  Her name is about new beginnings, opening doors and trusting God in the transition.

That’s the story of our lives in the season in which she’s joined us.  We’re a family of five becoming a family of six.  Ezra, our boy wonder, is starting school.  After five happy years outside Cambuslang we’re moving to a new house in a new town.  And we’re doing it all at a time when it literally makes no sense.  Who would move house and take on a bigger mortgage just as interest rates are being hiked?  Who would buy a big old brick-build just as energy prices go through the roof?  Why shift the kids into a new school when they’re only just getting used to the first one?  And why do it all at once?  I mean…. we’re moving in a week and a day.  We’re going to have a babe in arms not 6 days old when our movers come to start packing up our lives.  Why on earth are we doing this?

These are all questions that confront me in my darker more anxious moments.

It doesn’t make sense.  Or rather, without faith, it doesn’t make sense.

But we’ve got faith.  We don’t believe in accidents, but in providence.  We don’t believe in random chance, but in a sovereign God.  We don’t believe that, as Forrest Gump wondered, “we’re all floating around accidental like on the wind”.  We’ve got faith that what we’re doing is for a reason.

Sometimes people talk about faith as if it’s the opposite of evidence.  I don’t see it that way.  I see faith as a choice to trust your weight to the strength of the evidence you’ve seen.  And this season has been a season for faith.  Not blind, reckless or baseless conjecture.  But choosing to trust because of what God has said and done.

Like I said, we were done at three.  And I was never going to move.  “Bury me in that back garden” I used to say to Roxy, not entirely joking.  I hate change.

But then change marched into our lives.  Biology doesn’t always go to plan, and there we were looking at a positive pregnancy test.  Roxy began talking about a bigger place.  She felt like we needed to push on some doors and see what happens.

A house came up just a few streets away – our dream house, in many ways.  “Would you move for the right house if it was only a few streets away?” she asked.  Maybe.  We did our sums.  Pushed on the door.  It didn’t work out.

Another house came up.  Even better, in some ways.  A little outside of our neighbourhood, but in the same town.  “Would you move for the right house if it was just across there?” she asked.  Maybe.  We pushed on the door.  It didn’t work out.

But by now something had changed.  It felt like we were moving.  Were we?  Were we actually going to leave this area?  We love this area.  We had big dreams for this area.  We had a vision for what our lives would be like here.  Was it all for nothing?  I went on a run, asking God for a sign.  Just occasionally God answers your prayers very literally.  He showed me a sign.  I run there every week.  It wasn’t a new sign.  But I’d never noticed it before.  And as I stopped and stared, the words burned themselves into my eyes: work undertaken and complete.  Our work here was done.  We were moving.

Rox had the feeling that pushing on this door meant putting our own house on the market.  Before we’d sold.  Not only do I hate change but I’m naturally pretty risk averse.  So you can imagine this is pretty much a nightmare for me.  But, she’s very pretty, and she knows how marriage works.  So she got her way.  We were told the figure to expect on our home report.  But a different number niggled at us – a number that was important to us because of a random gift we’d received at a significant moment in our lives years ago.  That was the number we based our sums on.  And on the morning where it was do-or-die for putting the house on the market, and all the reasons why not to do it loomed large, we got the home report through.  It wasn’t the number the agent had told us to expect.  It was the number we’d received through the door all those years before.  To us, it was a sign.  A sign that was the plan.  This is what we were meant to do.

I won’t write the whole story… it would take too long, and probably isn’t as interesting to anyone else as it is to us!  The long version is a story of a hundred little answers to prayer, a thousand little coincidences, a word of encouragement here, a dream there.  A million things that we’ve clung to as reminders that God is with us in this, that He’s leading us through this, and that He’ll be with us on the other side of it.

Fast forward to August 2022.  We’ve sold.  We’ve bought.  We’re waiting on missives concluding.  The economy is crashing.  The cost of living is exploding.  And we’re 40 weeks pregnant and about to move house.  There’s lots to stress about.

But something prompts Roxy to have a look back at a message she’d sent someone about a dream she had.

She had this dream a year ago – August 2021.  A full 12 months before.  Pregnancy was the last thing on our minds.  Moving home wasn’t on the cards, not even close.  But in this dream, we were moving house with a new born baby.

Coincidence, right?  Dreams can be crazy I guess.  These things happen.

But we’ve got faith.  Faith that when everything seems up in the air and thrown together and like it might fall apart at any second… God always knew what was going to happen.  And he’d told us a year in advance all about it.

Welcome to the world Avril Faith.  You were part of the plan long before we knew it.  And your name, and your precious little life, encourages us to press on and trust in God as He opens the door to this next season for us.