Sunday, June 03, 2012

A Week of Blessings

Every week is filled with untold (and sometimes unrealized!) blessings. We get to experience life and love -we get to have deep conversations and laugh hard with friends - we get to eat hamburgers off the grill and taste homemade ice cream.  :)  Sometimes we forget to see the blessings.  And sometimes God makes the blessing impossible to miss!

This week was one of those times.  :)

Huge Blessing #1: My new job! (check out my last post for more details)  This one blessing will impact our schedule, our money, my talents, and my dreams.  It's like God custom-designed this blessing for our lives!

Huge Blessing #2: My sister's new job!  Amy and Matt have been living with us for 3 weeks, and during that time Amy had 3 job interviews and was offered 2 of them! (kind of unheard of in the Cedar Rapids area...especially when she didn't really have any prior connection to the schools!)  She actually originally wanted the only one she didn't get offered, but once again God knew better, and the one she ended up accepting is a MUCH better fit, and will bless their family immensely!

Huge Blessing #3: We paid off our debt!  We've been chipping away at our debt since we got married, but because of life circumstances, the progress always felt pretty slow.  India set us back quite a bit, but also pushed our butts into gear as we experienced what it was like to have choices taken away from us because of money.  When we got back we started being really intentional about using our money frugally, but when we started thinking about having a baby, we realized that I wouldn't be able to stay home if we didn't get this debt paid off!  And frankly, we had had enough of our choices being made for us. :)  So we packed our apartment up, moved into my parent's basement, and spent as little money as possible for 14 months.  Two cars and 4 student loan chunks later, we are officially debt free!  We still have our house, and are planning to put that on the market in the next couple of weeks.  Hopefully in the next year we can sell our house and get a down-payment saved up while we're still living with my parents.  WAHOO!

This debt thing has been interesting, because we could have gotten it paid off a lot sooner if we'd made the "tough" choices then.  However, I was thinking about what we've done, where we've lived, the experiences we've had, and I wouldn't trade any of them.  So, I feel like I can rest in the knowledge that things are just as they should be!

2 comments:

Matt and Amy Farley said...

I LOVE YOU!!!

Lindsay said...

Nicole,

So great to hear the exciting things God is doing in your life!

It's also awesome about the debt... that was a priority for Christian and I too, and it's so nice to be free from the bondage of debt!

It sounds like your sister is going to be living in the CR area... we still live in CR (and love it), so please let me know if she'd ever be interested in getting together for dinner or meeting some people. If they've been in the CR area for awhile and are already plugged in - no worries! :)

-Lindsay