Page 37 - Evidence of Things Unseen

moved in without having the money on hand to pay the closing costs. She said that I would
surely embarrass her greatly when that date came. I told her that God had confirmed to me
that we were to move here, and I was confident that when the date came I would have the
money in hand.
My confidence remained high, and as the days ticked by I was looking daily for God’s
provision. When we came to within a week of the closing date, and I still did not have the
money, I then began to experience some troubling of my soul. On the day before the closing
date I still did not have the money and the thought came to me that I should go and see
what I could get for my beloved Tracker. I was in some perplexity at this time, and did not
know if this was the voice of God, or if I should stand in faith looking for some other
provision. In the end I decided to go and see what a dealer would give me for the vehicle.
The dealer I took my Tracker to checked the vehicle over thoroughly and then offered
me $3,600 for it. This was the exact amount I needed for closing on the house. I accepted
the offer and then called my wife to pick me up. The next day we used this money to close
on the house. I struggled for a while with thoughts of whether God would have manifested
some other provision if I had not sold the Tracker, but over time I became convinced that
it was God’s will for me to sell this vehicle. I came to understand it as part of His discipline
for my having gone back into debt again by buying the pick-up truck.
God began showing me a pattern of His dealing with me at this time. Before I had
converted the garage into a family room at our previous home, I had bought a new ping
pong table from Sears and set it up in the garage. I purchased the table on credit, and God
never let me enjoy it. The garage was not air conditioned, and it was too hot during most
of the year to be out in the garage without the door being opened. Our driveway was sloped,
and every time the ping pong ball would go out the door, which was often, we would have
to chase it all the way down to the road. Added to this, the Holy Spirit would bring me
conviction about my sin of buying this item through debt, and this conviction took all the
enjoyment out of the game. In the end, the Spirit showed me that the only thing I could do
was to get rid of the table because it had been bought through disobedience. I ended up
giving it to a church for their youth group to use.
As I mentioned, I later converted this garage into a family room, and it turned out
more remarkable than I could have imagined. It was simply beautiful. I put in a designer
ceiling, and a ceiling fan, with air conditioning vents in this room. We insulated everything
and put up some lovely paneling on two of the walls, with sconce lighting fixtures that I had
long admired. On the third wall, where the large garage door had been, my wife and I hung
a wallpaper mural over the entire wall that depicted a grist mill in the mountains of North
Carolina with a flowing stream and autumn colors in the trees. We put down linoleum on
the floor, and we even installed a propane fireplace with a beautiful mantel along one wall.
Capping this off, I had installed wiring for a stereo and had wall-mounted some Bose
mini-cube speakers that provided awesome sound. Across the back of this room I had
installed full length accordion doors to divide between the family room and the utility room
where the washer and dryer were located, and in the doorway leading from the house to the
garage I had installed a swinging door with a stained glass window.
I had never done such beautiful work in my life, and once more God would not let me
enjoy it because I had paid for it all by applying for a credit line at a local hardware
superstore. The room had only been finished a short time when God’s Spirit told me I was
going to have to sell the house. Now, if the room had turned out poorly I would not have
minded. But it was absolutely gorgeous. The mural itself was breathtaking and people