“I have good news and bad news”.

My heart sank even as I tried not to imagine the worst. The phrase “bad news” is not really what you want to hear from your mortgage broker when you’re in the process of trying to secure a house.

“The good news is that the finance shouldn’t be a problem. The bad news is that your current lender won’t lend on that particular house. You could of course change lenders but there’s an early repayment penalty of several thousand pounds”. His voice sort of trailed off at the end as I let out a despairing groan.

The events of the preceeding several weeks hurtled through my mind as his words sank like lead. Several weekends of house showings to sell our property followed by more weekends driving long distances to attend viewing appointments to find our new home. We had finally found one that seemingly ticked all the boxes. It appeared to be a dream come true. But now after two weeks of waiting, the bank was apparently saying “no”.

“Why?”, I asked.

“Well, it’s their policy not to lend on non-standard construction buildings. The property is timber-framed”.

The long and short of it was if we wanted that particular property, we not only had to find another lender but also several thousand pounds we hadn’t budgeted for.

After several attempts with other lenders, it quickly became apparent that many of them had the same policy with regards to non-standard construction. Even if we could cover the cost of the penalty, we couldn’t seem to find a mortgage lender.  Since we didnt want to run the risk of losing our buyer, we made the difficult decision of letting go and starting our house search all over again. To say I was disheartened was putting it mildly. 

What followed was a few weeks of a very stressful race against time to find a new property before our ‘chain’ fell apart.

When I saw today’s word prompt of From, the scripture that jumped to mind was James 1:17,

“Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change”.

During that period of worry and waiting for a timely property, trusting God was hard especially since I couldn’t quite see why He wouldn’t want us to have that house.

However, later on as I looked back, several issues became apparent that were not obvious at the beginning and then I was thankful to God that we were forced to let go. Although not evident at the time, losing out on that property was “a good gift” from God. If we had forged ahead against all odds, we would have regretted it.

Everything from God is good. However, our perspective and definition of “good” is limited. He never changes…there is no variation due to change. This means His goodness is constant. However, oftentimes we fail to judge the goodness of His actions (His gifts) on an eternal scale.

May we ever judge Him faithful even in difficult circumstances.

This post was originally written for Five Minute Friday.

(Image credit: Amy Shamblen from Unsplash)