It is Done

It is done. That was a favorite saying/lesson/teaching of mine during Leadership Summit last year. It refers to not looking back to sin after you've been forgiven. No matter what, It Is Done, and we shouldn't worry about what God has already forgiven us for.

But that has really nothing to do with my real reason for writing tonight. I'm saying "It is Done" and I'm really referring to our minivan search!! It's done! Complete! Finished! That's it! In other words, we bought a minivan! I think quite possibly I'm more excited that the whole process is done rather than the van itself. Don't get me wrong - the space inside of the vehicle is quite exciting to me. The girls won't have to touch each other, Chloe can't take Hailey's binky and play with it herself, there will be no fighting over someone grabbing something out of someone else's hands, and Maddie will finally be able to buckle her own seat belt again. But on the other hand, there's a few things that I will miss about our three-ring-circus-squeezing-into-one-ring: the possibility of the girls holding hands, Maddie helping Chloe with a juice box and being able to hand it right back to her, reaching toys for each other, me able to reach pretty much anything that is on the floor, having the diaper bag so close it's usually touching someone ... should I go on?

All that said, God really led us to this vehicle and I -more than ever- am a believer of "God's timing." It's no coincidence that we found this vehicle on the very day that Maddie and I got baptized. It's no coincidence that it has the exact features we wanted (dual sliding doors, quad seating and a CD player). It's no coincidence that it was under, (yes, under!) our budget. So much so that we can start saving for our next vehicle. Or at least the large quantity of gas this one will consume.

And so let me sum up the past week. Last weekend, we were ready to buy a different minivan with a ton of creature comforts, as Mike puts it. I loved the seating arrangements, and it even had a VCR (and DVD hook ups) for the kids in the back. It was ugly, don't get me wrong, but it had some nice qualities. So we took out a bunch of cash and drove over to the dealership. There were some things wrong w/ the van and while the salesman could have taken a significantly amount less (cash talks, apparently), we would have been responsible for fixing the problems. Not really something I was interested in. Plus, the girls were driving me crazy and running all over the place. I wanted to escape fast. Then there was another one (almost the same vehicle) from a private party seller - little to no features. He was asking too much for the vehicle and when we offered less, he seemed a little offended and said the lowest he'd go was, well, more than we were willing to pay for it. We were disappointed that this was taking this long and our endless hours of searching the Internet, bidding on eBay, calling and emailing sellers, checking carfax, loading the girls into the truck to check out yet another one - wasn't yet done.

Meanwhile, the family we bought our Big White Whale from was preparing their vehicle - for us. Only they didn't know it yet. God's timing is perfect ... if only he'd clue me in sometimes, huh?