Even zeal is no good without knowledge, and he who hurries his footsteps misses the mark.

Proverbs 19:2

Afa and I have been casually looking to buy a house for about six months and seriously looking for the last eight weeks. For the first four weeks of this endeavor, I dove in with lots of zeal but little knowledge of what my efforts should look like – and more importantly without having a conversation with Afa about what our roles should look like during the process. For me, zeal looks like organization and spreadsheets and overcommunication, diving into the busy work of a task. And there is a lot of busy work with buying a house. I was looking through all the listings, making notes about the prices, the distances to places we travel often, the ways we could use the house to accommodate everyone in our household. I then contacted our realtor with the list of houses we wanted to see and responded almost immediately to any inquiries or schedules he sent us. 

Afa and I generally work very well as a team. My strengths are organization and communication, and his are people skills and execution. But again, we never discussed how we wanted to divide the labor in this area. I leaped in with two feet. To me, the two most important aspects of the house we were looking for was the price and the number of bedrooms. To Afa, the most important aspect of the house was the resale value a few years down the road. As disciples, we tend to move frequently, so we are buying a house more as an investment and less as a long term place to settle down. When we started I had no understanding about how neighborhoods and disclosures impact the resale value of a house. These separate priorities that we had not put into words yet meant we were looking for completely different houses without realizing it.

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

1 Corinthians 11:3

A few weeks in, I was exhausted. From my perspective, I was putting hours into researching each of these houses, and when we would go look at my carefully researched houses, Afa didn’t like any of them. I thought he was being haughty, like he was too good for the houses I found. But we couldn’t afford houses more expensive than the ones I was looking at. I’m so grateful for our discipling partners who are willing to have hard conversations with us because all of this came to a head during a discipling time. I melted down in tears because I was doing all of this work on top of everything else going on at the time, and it felt like such a wasted effort. In the middle of my emotional train wreck, Afa said one thing that changed my entire perspective: No one asked you to do that. 

That sentence hung heavy in my mind the next morning during my Bible reading and prayer. “Hadn’t he asked me to do that?” Nope. I assumed he wanted me to. “Wasn’t I just trying to be a good wife and helper?” Well, maybe that was my intention, but it certainly wasn’t working that way in reality. When he got up that morning, I asked if he wanted me to stop looking for a house, and he said yes, he wanted me to stop looking so that he could take care of it. There were so many thoughts raging in my mind: What if you try to buy a house we can’t afford. (We were pre-approved for a loan, so he already had a limit that he couldn’t go over.) What if you don’t respond to the realtor on time, and we miss a house? (That house wasn’t for us.) What if you pick a house that is so far away that our commutes are untenable? (Do I trust my husband to do what’s best for our family?)

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

John 4:10

So I stopped. I deleted the realty apps from my phone. I read the emails from our realtor but didn’t respond. I stepped back entirely from the house-buying process. Because my husband asked me to. That first week, Afa missed a few emails from the realtor. I didn’t nag him or even remind him, so we did not see any houses that weekend. This is what I call natural consequences with my children, and it works really well for adults too. The next week, he responded to all the realtor’s emails, and we saw some great houses. In fact, over the following few weeks, he went and saw houses without me because I needed to do some other things for the kids and for his parents. We put an offer on a house that I had never seen in person.

And let me tell you what, my entire persona changed. I had humbled myself. Stepped back into the role God designed for me. Afa still sought my thoughts about everything, but I wasn’t pouring myself out in a tedious endeavor. I could take care of the myriad of other responsibilities I have while he took this one on full force. I was calmer. I could enjoy looking at the houses we went to instead of filled with dread that this was one more giant waste of time. I was just along for the ride – the peaceful, joyful, exciting ride of following my husband. 

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:2

We still don’t have a house. In fact, we aren’t any closer to finding a house than we were two months ago. I have learned, however, that’s not really the point. I am on this journey with God and my family, and we are back on the right path after I veered us off of it for a few weeks. The pattern of this world, the pattern that I learned, was that if I work hard enough I’m going to be successful. But God wants to transform my mind. He wants me to trust Him. He wants me to trust my husband. He wants me to let go, submit, surrender. That’s the will of God – not that we find the perfect house or live in comfort or figure out our budget, but that I make righteous choices each and every day.