In 1982 when the Lord called us to sing full time, we left our home in Pittsburgh and rented this big, rambling house in Sandy Lake. Dear friends of ours, Doug & Sue Williams, and their family lived with us for a while and the large dining room made a great place for our Christian Nursery School. But after Doug’s moved and we closed our Nursery School (Donn had started working part time at Penn State, Shenango Campus), the house was too big and too expensive to heat. We closed off the upstairs and moved everyone downstairs for the winter.

One night I lay in our bed in the living room and concluded that this house no longer fit our needs. I began to enumerate things we needed or wanted that would fit our current situation, including hot water heat. (I’d been in a house that felt toasty warm upstairs and down and been told it had hot water heat!) When I finished, I was sad because I couldn’t think of any rental in Sandy Lake that met my criteria. Perhaps we’d have to stay where we were.

A day or two later, I went to a party in the home of a friend and saw these words on a wall hanging: “I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2). In the original context, Jesus was talking about heaven but at that moment, I knew He was saying to me, I go to prepare a place for you and your family now! Hope flickered in my heart. Maybe there was such a place in Sandy Lake, although I didn’t know where. Soon our dear friends, Dale and Jan Anderson, called to say their renters were moving out and would we be interested in renting the other half of their home?* When we walked through the rental, it had everything on my list, including hot water heat! However, we had a lease on our current rental and ultimately decided we needed to keep our commitment.

Some time passed but I couldn’t get the Anderson’s rental out of my mind. Finally, I said, “Lord, if you want us to rent half of Dale and Jan’s house, have them call and make us an offer we can’t refuse.” Later, the phone rang and Donn told me Dale’s would hold the apartment for a couple  months if our landlord would release us with a few month’s notice. Our landlord agreed and when the time was up, we moved into the place Jesus had prepared for us. The door that joined our half of the house to the Anderson’s was never locked, and I don’t think we exchanged a cross word the entire three years we lived there.

This was only one of the times that God “prepared a place for us” in ways that astounded and blessed us beyond measure. We can give testimony that “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him” (I Corinthians 2:9 NLT).

Thank you, Jesus, that you care about preparing a place for us not only for eternity but also for here and now. Amen.

*The “rest of the story” is that years earlier, I stood in front of the house we rented at the corner of School and Walnut streets in Sandy Lake (below)  and looked at this beautiful house on Broad street, longing for an opportunity to see what it was like inside. I never dreamed that eventually we would live there for three years!