Finding God’s Land
November 5, 2016, I was supposed to get on the plane home. It was September and we gave ourselves a deadline to buy our land by November 5th. Caren was with us, so was Galya.
We looked at land 45 minutes outside the city. We looked at land on the right bank. We looked at land that was a run-down bird farm. We looked at what used to be a collective cow barn back in the day. We looked at an inventor’s house with cubby’s and crevices, cute, but overrun by three years of neglect. We looked at land in Nicholai Polye.
And every time we looked for land, it rained. Sometimes it just sprinkled, but there was always some kind of precipitation—every single time. We joked that we’d know when it was our land when the sun came out. We prayed and we searched and searched, but couldn’t find just the right spot.
One day near the end of the month we decided to take the day off and visit a children’s foster home and a friend’s grandmother in one of the surrounding villages.
That day on our way home we drove out of the village, past a field overlooking the river on top of the hill. We slowed down saying, Imagine if this spot was for sale and the sun came out over the land.
The next day our friend’s mother called asking if we’d like to look at land in their village. She mentioned there was a plot of land on top of a hill.
I’m going to quote my update for the next part. But looking back, we laughed and said we should have just looked at our logo—it’s a exact picture of our land, the land God gave us to build a home for His fatherless children—and it was drawn several months ago.
“Steadfast love and faithfulness meet;
righteousness and peace kiss each other.
Faithfulness springs up from the ground,
and righteousness looks down from the sky.
Yes, the LORD will give what is good,
and our land will yield its increase.
Righteousness will go before him
and make his footsteps a way.” Ps 85:10-13
This morning I read those verses as I got ready to head out the door—to tell the landowners in Malokaterinivka that I would like to purchase their land! After six weeks of searching, praying, talking with friends and contacts, weighing pros and cons of so many different locations, this land seems to be the best of all worlds. People have been praying over that land for the past thirteen years and the man in charge of land in that village just became a believer last year, perhaps as a friend said, “For such a time as this.”
Please pray with us that God would either shut the door or do miracles in Jesus’ name as we begin the lengthy process of purchasing, registering, and re-zoning the land as residential.
One of my first kids, now twenty-one years old and studying in college, came by yesterday to do laundry. He was telling me about his English class and asked if I could write, “This is my family” on an old picture of him with several of his former classmates. I asked him what it was for and he said his teacher had yelled at him the other day because he didn’t bring in a picture of his family for an English exercise. He said rhetorically, “what does she want me to do, bring a picture of myself?” And I was impassioned all over again to build a place these young kids can call home so they have pictures of themselves with their “family” when they go to English class someday. None of them should have to be alone.
God has shown Himself to be so FAITHFUL and deeply in love with the fatherless children of Ukraine.
We purchased the land on November 4th and on November 5th I got on the plane.