By: Nathan Bate

The following is a testimony of God’s provision in the sale of our house in March 2010.

We were under financial pressure.  I had resigned from my assistant pastor position six months ago to prepare to plant a church.  Since then, we had paid the mortgage and utilities of our house back in Wakarusa, Indiana while living in Greenville, South Carolina and paying for the rent on our very small apartment and its utilities.

We had moved to be closer to Matt and Amy Athey - the couple we were praying with about starting a church.  Our house was for sale in Wakarusa, and we asked God to sell our house just as quickly as our previous house - two months. Two months came and went, and it stretched into six months.  

Our house was located in Elkhart County, Indiana.  At that time, Elkhart county had the second highest unemployment of all the counties in the nation.  Elkhart county was the RV producing capital of the world.  When the economy tanked, the local economy collapsed.  Katrina and I believed that God could do a miracle and sell our house quickly, and we looked forward to seeing what God would do.  

I ended up starting my own business so that we could pay the bills.  We barely paid our bills each month. Each month it was just enough.  We never fell behind, and we were always amazed how God provided.

We also spent hours with Matt and Amy talking, praying, researching, and just having a good time. We were all excited, nervous, focused, and stretched.  God was shaping our ministry relationships.  Starting a church was rapidly coming into focus.

But Katrina and I had been under great financial pressure for six months.  Yes, we needed to trust God, and then the pressure would dissolve.  We knew this and had done it over and over again.  God had taught us the lesson of trust repeatedly for which we were grateful.  Yet, I had reached the point were I began to have serious doubts.  The insurance rates on our house were quadrupling because we were no longer living in the house.  The following month our mortgage payment was going up fifty percent.

I wondered if we were doing the right thing.  Was God really blessing our efforts?  Or, was starting a church our own grand idea?  Were we running ahead of God?  Maybe we should move back into our house in Wakarusa.  That would save so much money, and it would be so nice to live in a house again instead of an apartment.  Our house was on a nice, shady, and calm street in the middle of small-town Wakarusa.  We were living in a two bedroom apartment with a one year old and a newborn.  Things were crammed.

These thoughts were flooding my mind, and one day over lunch, I shared them with Katrina.  She was surprised, but she understood what I was feeling.  She had been feeling some similar things.  While we were talking about it, the phone rang, and I went into the other room to take the call.  When I came back to the table, Katrina asked me what the phone call was about.  God had just made his will clear.  The phone call brought the news that we would be receiving an offer on our house.

It wasn’t an easy offer.  The offer required us to bring $7,000 to closing, and clearly we didn’t have the cash in hand to to do that.  But that was insignificant.  At a very delicate and discouraging time, right in the middle of our conversation about how to handle things, God had reminded Katrina and I of his sovereign care in our lives.  We praised God for what he was doing in our lives.

God used the sale of our house to make his will for our lives very clear.  We had been planning to travel to Indiana in March to spend some time with family (Katrina grew up close to Wakarusa).  God arranged the closing date of our house to be while we were already going to be in Indiana.  That meant we didn’t have to make a special trip and a spend couple hundred dollars in travelling expenses just for the closing of our house.

God also worked out the timing so that we were able to have the entire $7,000 plus some for the closing of our house.  I had done a job four months previous that I had not been paid for.  And, as you might guess, the check for that job came in right before the closing of our house.

God taught us the lesson that we should walk by faith and not by sight.  We trust this will encourage you in your walk with God.