This afternoon Aileen and I went out to look at homes in various neighborhoods in this area. We know that we want to buy a place of our own but are not quite sure where. Having rented for the past seven years we are growing increasingly tired of paying other peoples’ mortgages and feel it would be nice to pay our own! Right now we live in a rented home in a very wealthy town where real estate prices are generally inflated beyond what we can afford. So we have been looking outside of this town at a few others that are nearby where the prices are a bit more within our means.
A few years ago I might have asked, “Where does God want us?” But today I’m not so sure that is really a legitimate question. Does God want us in Oakville? Does He want us in Hamilton? I don’t know. I don’t know if God really cares about where we are as much as our motives for going there. As it stands Aileen and I have very few ties to this town or any other. We both work from home and between us we only have a couple of family members in the immediate area. Our church has locations throughout the area so anywhere we move we could continue to attend either our church or one of our daughter churches. We have examined the options and just don’t see that there is any one town where we should be. We do not expect or even ask for some type of divine revelation to guide us. We think it is wide open and feel we can use our “sanctified reasoning” to choose a home and a hometown. Of course we will pray and ask God to help us make good decisions and even to open or close doors as He sees fit. We’ll ask Him to continue to help us sort through our motives (especially as we drive through Hamilton, also known as Mullet-town). But ultimately we know that we’ll come to a day where we just have to decide whether or not to sign that piece of paper to close a deal.
So where does God want us? I think He wants us to be in a place where we’ll be happy. He wants us to be in a place that we see as a mission field and a place where we will allow our light to shine to the neighbors around us. Whether that place is called Hamilton or Burlington or Oakville seems to matter little. I hope that is how God feels too.
