When the sold sign goes up

It looks like it is actually happening. We are actually moving to London.

Let's cut right to the chase and bring you right up to date. After being on the market for months and months, we accepted an offer on our house in the middle of July.

We are currently at the stage of signing contracts and agreeing the exchange and completion dates with our buyers. They are keen to move and it is looking likely that we will be moving to Camden by the middle of October.

A number of things have to fall into place over the next few weeks, including finding a place to live and getting school places for the kids.

It is hard to believe that this is all happening and for the first couple of weeks after our house sold, we refused to let ourselves feel excited. After all, over the past three years, we have experienced a fair amount of disappointment; we had a letter put through our door from someone asking to buy our house and when we agreed, they then didn't want it, we had a house offered to us that was then withdrawn, we packed up our house in faith that God would provide us with a home and then nothing happened. We made an offer on a flat we couldn't afford because we knew God had spoken to us about it and on the same day our offer went in, the vendor withdrew the flat from the market, we had an offer made on our house which we accepted, which was withdrawn 6 days later.

The pressures of life also seem to have increased over the last couple of years, in family life, with our finances and often bizarre stressful circumstances that we suddenly find ourselves in (ask me about our holiday to Cornwall this summer..!).

The combination of pressure and disappointment can be like a time bomb waiting to go off inside and our experience has been that the moments we take our eyes off of Jesus and try to go it alone, we fall and mess up. Somehow, being able to say 'we don't know what to do' or 'we don't know how to solve this' is the best place to be, because it requires a humbling of ourselves, coming to Jesus and being completely dependent on him.

But, man, it's hard.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to blog a bit more of our story as we pack up (again!) and swap the countryside for city life. I also want to ask you to consider supporting us.

The request comes with no pressure - if you are enjoying just reading the blog posts, that's absolutely fine! However, a number of people have asked how they can pray for us and rather than sending lots of messages to lots of places, I will be capturing all of the prayer points within the blog posts. So how can you help?

1. Pray!

As Christians, we believe that prayer changes things and that we have a Father in heaven who hears our prayers and answers them. We would be ever so grateful if you used our prayer points in your prayer times over the next few weeks.

2. Pray and fast.

Praying and fasting is a bit of a mystery but it is an effective way of seeing breakthrough in difficult or challenging situations. We have been, together with our small group, praying and fasting about a number of things relating to our move. If this is something you feel able to join us in, please see the blog posts for the days we are praying and fasting on.

3. Financial support

We have been asked by a few people how they can give us a gift of money to help us when we move. We have set up a Just Giving page in order to facilitate this. Please be assured that we are not asking for or expecting money, but want to provide an easy way for people to support us in this way if they want to. I will explain this in a bit more detail in my next post.

Prayer Points

1. That we would find a home. We are going to London on Friday and Saturday this week to look at some houses. Please pray that God would direct our steps to the right one.

2. We are hoping to be able to look around a High School for Eli on Friday as well. Please pray that we are able to and for school places to be available in Years 10, 8 and 4, for Esther, Eli and Jemimah.

3. For financial provision. We have a lot of costs to cover over the next few weeks, please pray that God would provide us

with enough.

4. For friendships for the children - they are feeling the potential challenge of moving mid-term.

5. For Tim and I, that we would cope with the pressures of the next few weeks and that our marriage would be strengthened and not strained.

We will be praying and fasting on Friday (6th Sept) this week.

Next Blog Post: Here I am