Don’t waste what you do have

We have sold our house.

I should try that with a bit more enthusiasm. We have sold our house! Ugh. That was fake.

As excited as we are about our new place and its possibilities, I willing admit that I am sad to leave our current house. With the exception of lacking a bath tub in the master bedroom, this house is pretty perfect for us. We love it. When we moved in, we had one baby just shy of his 1st birthday. We had so much empty space and bare walls we didn’t know what to do.  Three very short years later, we have three boys and and every inch of this house is full of stuff and more importantly, memories.

 

Since we decided to make the move, we have both had waves of “what ARE we doing?!”. This is not your typical move. It is so atypical that the mortgage company gave us a hard time and made us jump through extra hoops. Not because we have poor credit or couldn’t afford to buy the house without first selling our current one, but because *GASP* only people committing fraud would leave their nice, 2467 square feet home and move into a home that costs substaniouly less and has a pitiful 1,916 square feet. 550 square feet… WHO would do that unless they had to?

 

That would be us.

How much could 550 square feet really matter anyway? Let me tell you. That is a lot of space. Gone.

Last night, after packing a few boxes of just garage sale items, I was pretty proud of myself. We are really paring down and it felt good. Then, I started to graph out where our furniture would go in the new house and realized… some of it will not. Wow. This new house is much smaller. Can we even walk between our dresser and bed? WHAT ARE WE DOING?! My husband has a great job, our finances are just fine thank-you-very-much, there is no need to move.

Then it really hit me. Guilt. A huge flood of it.

I am so ashamed that I was even thinking all of those thoughts. Right now, in Ghana, there is a children’s home full of 50 orphans who are at risk of eviction if $24,000 is not raised immediately. I posted about it recently. I actually posted about it, made a donation and, just days later, had so forgotten about them that I was feeling sorry for myself that we have made a decision to move into a smaller house. How blessed are we to be able to make such a decision?

 

“To be upset over what you don’t have is to waste what you do have.”

– Ken Keyes, Jr.

I have an amazing family of  3 loud boys that are going to FILL this small house with noise and run wild in it’s awesome forest-like backyard. I’m not going to waste that for another minute.