Choosing the Good Portion Series - Part 4

May 2024

Phew. I didn’t think I’d ever get around to a “part 4” of this series because life has been so wild lately. We bought a farm on 26 acres, but we’re going to need to back up a bit before I share more.

In September of 2023, we went under contract on a new house. It was beautiful. It was that gorgeous southern brick with a new kitchen and plenty of room in the backyard for the kids. It was only 3 minutes to my mom’s house and 2 minutes to my grandma’s house. We loved it.

But after a complicated few weeks, the sale fell through.

We had boxes packed, things stored at my parent’s house, and it felt like our dreams were crushed. I didn’t understand why we found the perfect house in a great location, with all the boxes checked, only for it to fall through. It’s like when I was pregnant with our fourth baby (before Maddie) and I miscarried. I was overjoyed that we were expecting our fourth baby, only to have a miscarriage a few weeks later.

The dream was gone.

While I know a house and a baby are on totally different levels, I was still devastated with the loss of this house. When it fell through, I thought, “Now what?” Why does God take away “good things”…and why did we ask for clarity only to lose the house?

We put most things on pause and sat at the Lord’s feet. We wanted a home. We wanted to plant roots. We wanted to finally feel settled after medical school and moving and residency and crazy schedules. We wanted peace.

Then I got sick in December of 2023 and my doctors found a tumor. Cancer again? What is going on, Lord? I couldn’t believe all of the disappointments and frustrations happening all at once.

But the only thing we could do was wait. So, we waited. We paused. We questioned. We prayed. We wrestled with what the Lord wanted for our family…and then we waited some more.

Fast forward a couple months to March of 2024, which I’ll label as the “sick and disastrous month.” We, as in ALL six of us, caught the stomach bug, not once but twice. I didn’t even know that was possible but there we were. It was miserable.

Sometimes when I’m miserable, I try to make things better by distracting myself with something fun or adding some change into my life. Are you like that? So, I started checking Zillow religiously and searching for new jobs for Andrew, creating a new life for our family almost every week. It wasn’t that I wanted to move to all of these locations that I found or even live in any of the houses I found. It was that I was so desperate for roots and clarity and direction and a plan. And when you’re operating in the flesh and you’re not in control, you do everything you can to take control of something, and for me, that was finding a house and a job for our future life.

If this sounds familiar to you, obsessively planning like this, then you’ve probably done what I was doing. And that is using planning as a means of feeling like you are still in control. You’ve probably been hurt or experienced way too much pain in your past and you truly believe that if you do everything you can to weave this grand plan, then just maybe you’ll be able to save yourself and the ones you love from any future pain. Your intentions aren’t all bad, but you’re striving for comfort and putting yourself in the Savior role…but there’s only One whose rightful place is on the throne.

Unfortunately, our faith doesn’t work when we’re the god of our own lives.

I thought that if I could use the brain God gave me and planned out a beautiful life for my family, then we’d be ok. Then all our hard work would finally pay off. We’d finally be settled. But the truth was that I wasn’t trusting. I wasn’t sitting at the Lord’s feet. I wasn’t listening.

I was being Martha….again. I was doing and planning and mad at anyone who didn’t hop onboard.

Except there was Jesus across the room. Sitting with the me I wanted to be, at his feet. The woman who trusted. The woman who knew where her treasure was. The woman who saw what was most important. It was’t the house. It wasn’t the comfort of a plan. It wasn’t the display or the preparations. It was never about that. It was Jesus Himself.

That’s when it hit me. What have I been doing the last year? Have I truly trusted God with the outcome? Or have I been lying to myself, acting as if trusting God is 90% using what He has given me (time, planning, control, personality…etc.) and the remaining 10% is actual surrender?

I wanted clarity and we prayed for answers. It wasn’t until I deleted Zillow, stopped looking for a future life for our family, and released that unnecessary burden of control that I had been carrying on my back that the Lord showed us what we had been searching for this whole time.

The Farm. The Faithful Homestead.

I cry as I type this because it has been the most humbling experience for me, personally in my relationship with the Lord. I always say that I learn the most through pain. In fact, I’ve preached that dozens of times, “that you grow in the darkest times.” And while God, of course, uses dark times to draw us to Himself, it’s not always as black and white as I’d like to think. So much of our sin nature and pride is exposed when the fire gets the closest to us. But because I have walked through unthinkable things and horrible trauma, I always thought God would ONLY teach me and help me learn through the hard stuff. But I’m seeing a softer side of how the Lord works. The side that woos us to Himself through grace and trust.

Learning through GRACE and not always pain.

This is all new to me, friend. So, I apologize if this newness of growth has you misunderstanding my heart, but I want to encourage you in the fact that it is possible to grow in the grace. Not just in the pain.

All the growth doesn’t have to happen at rock bottom. Just like every believer doesn’t need a crazy testimony like, “I was on drugs and did X, Y, and Z and then the Lord transformed my heart!”

He is a personal God and meets each us where we are, whether in a valley or on a mountaintop.

So, learning through grace is where I am, because the farm quite literally dropped into our lap. The listing was apparently on Zillow for months and months (which is absolutely WILD to me because I never saw it). It even dropped in price because it was on the market for so long. It’s almost as if God said, “NOW!” and when He breathed that out into existence, our eyes were opened and we saw His plan. Not the forever plan, but the next few steps for our family.

The farm is everything we wanted and needed plus more. It caught us off guard. It’s definitely surprising and unexpected…but so exciting. It’s going to take hard work. I honestly believe that this lifestyle is what will heal me and bring God the most glory as we serve our new community. If you EVER in a million years told me I’d be buying cows and chickens, planting a massive garden, and homeschooling my kids on a homestead, I would laugh so hard. But the grounding, the soil, the hard work, the growth, the planting, the peace, the sowing of the seeds, both in the land and in my children’s hearts, is exactly what we all needed as a family.

God knew.

Of course He did. Why do I forget that? I’m not all knowing! I can’t see the beginning and the end. I don’t know the intricate details of every person’s life! So why do I ever try to insert myself and try? It’s like I’m begging for a seat at God’s table despite knowing that He already has created a beautiful chair with my name on it.

It’s all been so humbling because I didn’t do a thing. Every step of the way it has been one big God thread. I saw His power, His grace, His authority, and His goodness in a new way because of this farm. And while this whole process consisted of some hard days and conversations and questions, it was a different type of hard. Not learning through trauma and suffering which is what I’m used to.

I’ll share more as time goes on but The Faithful Homestead is a reminder that God is always faithful and truly has good gifts for His children. Not everything has to be one big life of trauma with pain and suffering. Something good will grow. Something good is growing in your life and I hope and pray you believe that. Respectfully, you, sweet friend, have no idea what God is up to. So, take the leap and jump on the ride and trust Him, knowing that your life is in the hands of a Sovereign and Mighty God who wants to include you and use you and grow you…because of His great love for you.

Never forget that. Choose the good portion. Keep choosing the good portion.

Love,

Nicole