Community.

Michael and I have been offered a few opportunities.

It's all sudden and strange.  I feel sort of other-worldly.

The hard thing about it all is that while we've known we are stagnating where we are for awhile, and that perhaps our work here is done, so to speak, we haven't had clear direction about where to go or what to do next.

We've been praying and we both feel that the next thing that has to happen for us is for our land to sell.  It's seven acres that we just don't want, and selling it would allow us to pay off our debts (not counting our mortgage).  With that burden lifted, we would have the freedom to go and do whatever we feel God is leading us to do. 

There have been a ton of false starts - people saying they're interested, people drawing up contracts, but no one has gone through with the actual purchase of the land. 

It IS an irregular piece.  We don't have all the necessary papers for immediate building because we don't have 5K to drop on it right now.  So I get why people are worried. 

We've been assured by planning and zoning types that it won't be a big deal to get the necessary permits and survey of the land - for a price - but people are still wary.  I don't blame them.  It would be a shame to drop 49.9K on a piece of land to find it not buildable in the end.

Anyway - we had planned on selling the land, then moving into an RV for our RV year.  We would either sell the house (on which we're under water...) or rent it out for the year, and tour the country in an RV.  We've been set on this awhile.

But there has always been this idea of intentional community.

It's something that we pursued pretty strongly about a year ago with others who we thought were interested, but it never panned out.  Many of the people who said they were interested ended up following other paths or losing interest eventually or weren't able to commit right away, so the matter was dropped.  It had been so appealing to us last year and we were very serious about follow through, but nothing ever happened, and we made other plans.

In just the last few months, however, we've been presented with two different opportunities for the sort of community we wanted last year so desperately.

One would be moving into a garage belonging to another family and sharing life with them in a neighborhood and helping to build up a new church community.  We would also finish the garage while we were living there and share costs and meals with the family in the main house. 

The other opportunity would be living in a mansion in a smaller city with several other people - some singles, some married couples.  Our family would have its own floor in the four story home, but we would share common areas, cash, food, and life with the others in the house.

Both ideas scare me.

But I certainly don't want to be the person sitting on the roof of the house during the major flood praying for God to save me and telling the helicopter and row boat that I'm not going to go with them because I'm waiting for God to save me. 

We've been praying about next steps and changes and here are these two opportunities.

And yesterday, Michael got a call from our realtor saying someone was interested in the land.

Of course it might fall through like all the other times - but when the land sells - will we be ready to move in the direction God is taking us?