~whew~ I’ll try to remember all I can about our time in Albuquerque, but right now it’s all just a great big blur. A good, happy, blessed, fun, busy blur. :-)

We got up early last Wednesday morning and headed down to the realtor’s office to sign the papers to sell our house. Got all of that taken care of. Learned that the closing date is supposed to be December 27th. HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HO! HO! HEE! HEE! HEE! HA! HA! HA! (Are you sensing the maniacal tone there?) Is that nuts, or what?! So that means we may be having Christmas Joe’s way this year. He told me about a week ago that he wanted to have Christmas in a motel this year. Well… ! Ha!

We finished up at the realtor’s office and headed to Albuquerque. Got there in time to meet up with Dustin & Jamey and get settled in at the Days Inn before Revival that night. We had a very, very good Revival and Brother Dustin did a fabulous job. (You don’t know how it pains me to say that, but…!) Really, he is my kind of preacher. By that I mean that he preaches good, practical things that you can take home and apply to your life, not just a bunch of hoopla and churchy sounding clichés. There are always good, meaty things that make you consider your life and how it may need to change. Good stuff. He preached about being ready for what God wants to do in your life (like the man at the pool of Bethesda) and about being hungry for the Lord and about the verse that says to add to your faith virtue and to virtue knowledge, etc. He preached about all eight qualities in that verse and how they connect to each other and come in proper order—a progression, I suppose—for a reason. The one that spoke to me most was temperance—self-control—in every area of life. Ooooh. Lots to pray about! Brother Dustin didn’t preach all of the above on the first night, by the way, I just got ahead of myself. He is a bit of a long-winded preacher (his wife was about to give him the finger-across-the-throat signal that last night, but he cut it off just in time! Ha!), but even he wouldn’t attempt to preach all of that in one night. :-) Anyway, we had a very, very good Revival with good preaching, good worship, and good prayer all week long, and several visitors to boot.

On Saturday night we were soooooo blessed to have Brother Banuelos, Hector & Erika, Tayde, Luis & Keila and kids all drive up from Hatch to be with us. It was wonderful!!! They ministered to us in song and testimony and interpreting. They will never know how much they are loved and appreciated. I have never, ever been in service with them that I haven’t been deeply blessed by them. We’re so glad they came! We all went out to eat after service and had a great time of fellowship with them, too. Fun, fun, fun. I just love those people!

Okay, I am sooooo jumbled up and all out of order! I guess I just told you all about the week of Revival, so now I’ll go back and fill in the blanks in between!

On Thursday we spent 4 or 5 hours running all over Albuquerque with the realtor, looking at lots and lots of houses. It’s so fun to look at houses (I’ve always enjoyed doing that), but it does get old after a while! And they all start to run together. If not for the wonder of digital cameras I’d never have a chance of remembering which house is which!

On Friday we took the day off from the house hunt to spend some time with Dustin & Jamey and the kids. I’m so glad we did! It helps to take a break and get your mind clear from the houses for a bit—and we have sooooo much fun with the Hays! We went to the zoo and then rode the train that takes you over to the aquarium. It was very, very cool and cloudy, but never actually rained. It made for the perfect day at the zoo because we practically owned the place—there was hardly anybody there! And it’s a terrific zoo. They’ve got animals that I haven’t seen at very many other zoos—koalas and kangaroos (even a joey with it’s hind legs poking up out of it’s mama’s pouch) and HUGE double humped camels (are they dromedaries?) and a black panther (eerie—he almost looks evil!) and all manner of other cool animals. It was great.

The aquarium is small, but neat, and they have a really fun GIANT playland for the kids where everything is HUGE, making the kids seem bug-sized.

It was about 3:00 by the time we were done with our outing and we were starved, so we went to Golden Corral for lunch, then back to our motel rooms for a little nap before church time. What a great day!

Most nights after service the Hays would come over to our room and we’d make sandwiches or something and play games. The kids would play until they got too wild, then we’d bed them all down all over the place so we big people could keep playing. :-) I had brought three games, but the only one we ever played was Balderdash. Ha! Sooooo fun! We laughed so hard at some of the stupid stuff that Dustin and James came up with! I even kept some of the cards so I could blog them, but they’re not easily assessable right now so it’ll have to wait until another time. It was so great!!! We’ve never really had a chance to spend any time with Dustin & Jamey (without a crowd of other church folks, that is) and we so thoroughly enjoyed it. Fun, fun, fun.

Let’s see, where was I? Ah yes, Friday night. After the Hays left (midnight-ish, I think) I got down and prayed and begged and pleaded with God for a little while about our house situation. We’ve been praying and praying, but I was starting to feel a little desperate at that point. There were houses available that would work for us, but nothing that seemed like “it,” you know? And maybe one of them was “it,” but we needed to know which one! I then got online and started checking the online listings. Again. We’ve been doing that for months now, but I just wanted to make sure there’s nothing that we might have missed or nothing new that we didn’t know about yet. So I prayed and clicked and prayed and clicked and prayed and clicked… until 3:00am when I finally made myself go to bed.

On Saturday we met with Jason (our realtor) again to look at some more houses. Everything is such a blur and I can’t remember what houses we saw when, or even how many houses we went in (even Jason can’t remember—but we all agree it was a LOT!), but we ended up narrowing the field down to two houses that are possible contenders. The first house has all of the space that we would need and could be a very nice house, but it would need lots of remodeling—the same kind of work and $$$ we’ve put into the house in Andrews. Actually, it would be MORE work and $$$, but the same KIND of jobs. Just more of them. :-) In the end, it would be a really nice house. One of the bittersweet things about it is that there is a swimming pool in the back yard. I mean a really nice in-ground one. It’s beautiful… but it takes up most of the back yard! I love the idea of my kids having a chance to learn to be really good swimmers and I know they’d have a lot of fun with it. But I’d hate that they wouldn’t have much of a yard to play in—and that they wouldn’t be allowed out the back door unless they have life-jackets strapped on, even if they weren’t planning on swimming!

The second house is more $$$, but it needs no work whatsoever. Except maybe a little paint outside and some shutters to purty it up a bit. :-) It’s really not very attractive from the outside, but it is beautiful on the inside. Hardwood floors and new carpet and a nice kitchen and recently remodeled bathrooms—all of the work that we did ourselves on our Andrews house has already been done at this place. It has all the space we would need, plus some. In fact, the square footage on the paperwork says it’s close to our current house in size… but it feels HUGE. The papers have got to be wrong! Anyway, it is just beautiful and would be soooo perfect for entertaining. Bunches of people at once. That would make me very happy. :-)

So we had a decision to make and it’s a tough one. Part of me is drawn to the fixer-upper house simply because I like the idea of doing the work ourselves. There’s something that just feels sort of wholesome or something about taking a house that needs work and putting in the time and effort to make it into something nice. It’s rewarding—and turned out to be a very good investment for us in Andrews. On the other hand, it would be grand and glorious to be able to move into a house that’s already fixed up and not have to worry about disrupting our lives any more (for a while, at least!) with a bunch more big projects! It would be sooooo nice to be able to just get into some sort of “normal” life, whatever that is. So do we pay more $$$ for the really nice house, or less $$$ for the one that needs work, then put more $$$ into it and end up having close to the same amount in it in the end??? I’ll tell you in a few minutes. ;-)

We had a good service on Sunday morning. I was asked to teach the little kids’ Sunday School class, so we went to the classroom and I started digging around in the closet trying to find some construction paper or crayons or SOMETHING to use for class. There wasn’t anything like that at all, but there were costumes! Ha! Fun! So I dressed everybody up (Katie, Joe, Sam & Isaac) and read through the Christmas story a few times while they acted it out. When Sunday School was over we went to the sanctuary and did it for everybody else. I think it went pretty well, all things considered! It was probably the fastest, most thrown together and least rehearsed Christmas pageant of all time, but they did good! The best part was when Joe whipped out the roll of masking tape and set it on his head as a halo. (He had dual duty as Joseph and the angel.) It was great.

Had a nice lunch at Cracker Barrel with the Hays and then had some time to rest for a few minutes, then start cleaning up the room and get some packing done before service that night. Another good one. Afterwards the Hays crowd came to our room for another round of Balderdash. We’re going to have lots of great memories of that game, I tell you! In fact, we just bought that game a few weeks ago, but we ran out of the little sheets of paper that came with it! We thought to save one clean sheet of it and Dustin used his copier (the man travels with a copy machine!) and made us about 90 more slips. We used all of them, too, then used almost all of the BACKS of them by the end of the week! Ha! Great fun. :-)

This morning we had a hurried breakfast, bid the Hays adieu, threw our belongings in the van, and rushed off to meet Jason and take a look at the “Top Three” houses on our list again, plus one new one. We did some more praying, had lunch, then went to Jason’s office and put an offer in on the NICE house—the one that doesn’t need anything but a country touch. ;-) We offered quite a bit less than the asking price and we can come up just a bit if necessary, but not a whole lot. So now we pray. Some more, that is! If it is God’s will for us to have this house, I would be soooooo thrilled. It’s sooooo nice!!! But if it’s not God’s will, we’ll probably make an offer (a much lower offer) on the fixer-upper house with the pool. That would be great, too, just a lot more work! Whatever God wants is fine with me and I finally feel surrendered in the situation and I think I’ll be happy with whatever happens. I know I’ve done a lot of praying through all of this, so it’s been really good for me.

I do have one confession to make though. When we first began looking for houses in the Albuquerque area we were hoping to land up in the east mountains—it’s very Colorado-ish up there and I would LOVE to live there. We had one particular house that we really, really liked, but we weren’t in a position to make an offer since our Texas house wasn’t under contract. It has since sold, and I was fine with that—took it to mean that it wasn’t God’s will for us. Obviously! But on our way out of town we drove up into the mountains and James drove me past that house again. It was snowing really pretty at the time and we were listening to Christmas music and there was “my house” up there in the mountains… ~sigh~ I fought hard to choke back the tears for a few minutes, I have to admit. Oh, how I love the mountains!!! I asked James if he was just testing me—or teasing me—or tormenting me! Ha! I’m much better now, though. There are pros and cons to just about everything. As much as I love the mountains and that particular house, it is out of town about 10 or 15 miles and would take a lot longer to get to the church. The house we put an offer in on is in nicer condition and is only 11.5 miles from the church. So I’ll look at it that way. I’m so glad that I have God to pour my heart out to and that He cares about my feelings and can help me sort through them and be really and truly happy with whatever. And that’s what I want—whatever He has for us. Mountains or no mountains, I know I’ll be really and truly happy if I am where God wants us to be. And I could really, really love this house in town, too. I’m trying not to get too attached to it just yet, in case it doesn’t work out. But I do really, really, really like it! :-)

Okay, that’s about it. Actually, I’m sure there’s much more to tell, but this is quite long enough, don’t you think? Actually, we’re in the van right now, driving back to Texas. I figured this would be my best (and only!!!) chance to write since I’ve got to dive head first into moving once we get home. So if it’s not too late when we get home (it’ll be at least 10 or 11 o’clock, it looks like) I’ll try to add some pictures and post this sometime tonight. Please keep us in your prayers and pray for our house situation, that God will work it all out according to His will and give us the house of His choosing!

Talk to you later!!!

~Rebekah~

--Okay, so it didn't work out the way I was hoping! We didn't get home until nearly midnight last night and we were wiped out. Did a few necessary things, then hit the hay. I was hoping to add some pictures of our trip, but that will have to wait until another time. It's nearly noon now and I still don't even have the van unloaded yet! The man is here doing the inspections on the house right now, so I don't really want to start tearing stuff up while he's here--don't want to be in his way, you know! Still no word on the house we made an offer on in Albuquerque. We should hear something by 6:00 tonight. Pray!!! God knows best and I trust Him. I'll try to get some pictures up sometime. But don't bank on anything--who knows how life is going to be around here for the next couple of weeks! Ha! Keep us in your prayers, please!!!