God’s Perfect Timing

I cannot get over how faithful and wonderful our God is!  Why do I ever doubt?  Why do we ever wonder if He is going to come through?  This journey has certainly been amazing, but the most amazing part has been the providence of God.  He is always right on time with exactly what we need.

Dylan drops off his truck to be sold before we leave for Texas.

Many of you already know that our truck sold…but I feel the need to share the whole story.  Just saying, “the truck sold!” does not do justice to the truth of God’s work in it all.  We had it sitting in a car lot in Dallastown for quite some time.  Many of you drove past Continental Auto Sales on a regular basis and kept us updated, “saw your truck the other day, any offers yet?”  With a dismal reply of “no” the conversation would usually move on to another topic as I got tired of talking about how everyone wanted the truck but couldn’t afford it.  As our time in Texas came to an end, a friend suggested taking it to an auctioneer in York, as he had much luck with selling cars there and actually making more than what he wanted.  Once we returned to PA, I was trying to be intentional about contacting Continental to get my truck back and take it to auction, as they run auctions every two weeks and I wanted to get maximum exposure before we left.  We were trying to avoid having to settle with Car Max, which offered $6,000 less than what we needed.  I called Continental and left a message.  Enter God…

I received a return voicemail from the sweet lady at Continental.  She apologized for taking so long to call back as she has had to deal with issues outside the business but was happy to inform me that they sold my truck last week!  I called back to thank them for selling my truck and find out if they were able to get the amount we were trying to get for it.  As you probably know by now from talking to us, the sale of our vehicles is what we were hoping to use to raise our start-up costs for Guatemala (our one-time costs to get set up down there in addition to our yearly budget needs).  She not only told me that we got the full amount, but explained the amazing turn of events that led to the sale of the truck.  The man who wanted to by the truck was willing to trade in his old truck.  However, the trade in value was not enough to provide the necessary funds to purchase it.  The dealership sold his truck for him in the matter of a week and he was able to buy it immediately for full price.  How awesome is that?  My truck sat there for 6 months, in addition to all the extra advertising I did and some of you helped with, but God showed up and took care of it all right in time!

To think I was in the process of throwing in the towel.  I was making a last-ditch effort to take care of it myself and God had it already taken care of!  It wasn’t even as if the sale was in process, it was completed and the money was cleared the very day I was going to pull it from the lot.  After we heard the news I couldn’t help but cry.  My tears were in response to the sheer joy of knowing deep down how much Jesus loves us.  I’ve been learning a lot lately that the purity and fullness of God’s love for us cannot be explained, it must be experienced.  This is one of those experiences.  But, there’s more!

If that wasn’t cool enough, my friend at Maverick Media through his contacts at BNI Global Business Network was able to hook me up with Ricke Bros Auto Sales to buy our other car from us…in the same week!!!  God not only sold 1 but 2 vehicles right when we needed Him to!  If you are wondering about the why the timing of selling our car was perfect, I should probably add that the inspection and registration expires at the end of December and we weren’t too excited about paying for it to be renewed right before getting rid of it.  Since we had a hard time selling the truck, we were a little skeptical about how we could sell the car in a month.

Dylan waiting for Missy to stop taking pictures of the car we lived out of on our way home from Texas.

It was after all this that I realized that it was never up to us or anyone else to sell the car or the truck in the first place.  It was up to God.  He called us to this mission and it is up to Him to provide for it.  It is our responsibility to just be obedient.  I learned over this past year from a book I read that responsibility is our response to His ability.  The only response I can come up with at this moment is praise to an awesome God who does awesome things exactly when they need to be done.