Barbara Preston, member of the body of Christ
Sometimes God will have us do something which we discover later likely saved us from doing something foolish.
When my husband and I were house hunting last year, one of the places we looked at was a condo in a 55 and older community. I liked this condo more than any other place we had been shown even though it had an HOA fee that was already up to $365 a month.
Normally this would have scared me away instantly. Before seeing this condo, I have never, ever wanted to become involved with these expensive ”open ended” HOA fees.
Then early last year, before we started thinking about the move, I found out that my son’s boss had a dog that he had adopted some time back but now needed to give up since he was getting ready to retire and do a lot of traveling and sailing. I had seen the dog and there was something about her that drew me to her.
We already had one dog and I had not even thought about getting another one.
But I could not stop thinking about her, hoping that she would find a good home. I also knew, from what my son had said, that she was a very fearful dog, for some unknown reason.
One day I found myself telling my son that I might be interested in adopting her. I remember thinking ... Why am I saying this? Do I really want to do this? But I said it anyway and we eventually ended up adopting her.
We found out that we could not change the landscaping at this condo so we could not put up fencing to keep the dogs safe which meant that one of us would have to leash them up and take them out every time they went outdoors.
I knew this would be a great inconvenience and difficult for us to do, especially since I am 79 years old and my husband is now 83.
I knew we could manage this with the small dog but not with having a second much bigger dog.
But there was no way I was going to give up one of my dogs so we could live in this condo, no matter how much I liked it.
God knew that and I am grateful for the opportunity I had to add a second dog to our family before we went house hunting. It made my decision making so much easier.
I have no regrets, at all. We ended up buying a house with a fenced-in back yard where they can safely go out by themselves and where we have an HOA fee of $12 a month.
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