The military transferred our family to Valdosta, Georgia in January, 1982. Our son, Toby, was 21 months old and I was five months pregnant with our daughter. At that time, we bought a double-wide mobile home trailer and rented a space in a trailer park. That Christmas, we moved our trailer onto a piece of property that we had purchased. The land was undeveloped, so we cut down trees, cleared away the brush, leveled the ground, and planted grass seed. Floyd (my husband) blocked in the trailer and built a huge porch on the front of it, turning it into a modular home. A couple of years later, our youngest daughter was born.
When the military gave Floyd orders to Greece, we contracted with a local realty company to rent the trailer for us while we were overseas. They did a good job of keeping it rented. We were in Greece for about 18 months and the military transferred us to Oklahoma. That’s where Floyd retired from the Air Force and he landed a job with GE in Cincinnati, Ohio.
We’d lived in Cincinnati for two years when GE moved us back down to Valdosta. Floyd actually bought a house down there before we moved. It was a repo so we got it at a very good price. Now we had two houses in Valdosta.
We’d lived in that beautiful, ranch-style house for about 18 months. Then one day Floyd said to me, “Let’s put both houses up for sale. We’ll let the Lord sell the one that He chooses and we’ll live in the other one.” That sounded like a good idea to me, but secretly I hoped that God sold the trailer; for two reasons. 1) I didn’t want to move again. 2) The house was much nicer and a lot roomier than the trailer. (That was the main reason.) Of course, it wasn’t really a secret to God. He knew the desires of my heart.
The next day, Floyd told a friend at work that we were selling the house. That friend told his parents, who were moving to Valdosta from Pennsylvania. A week later, they came to look at the house, and it was all over. God sold the house by word of mouth. We hadn’t even listed it for sale, nor talked to a realtor. We gave our tenants notice, packed up, and moved back into the trailer. When we bought the trailer, we had a toddler, with a baby on the way. But we moved back in with three children, ages 11, 9, and 6. Man was it crowded.
About 18 months later, GE was moving us back up to Cincinnati. Floyd decided that we would sell the trailer and sever our ties to Valdosta. So he tacked a little bitty “For Sale by Owner” sign onto a wooden post at the end of our incredibly long dirt driveway. (It was so long, it took about two minutes to walk from the house to the bottom of the driveway.) He wrote our phone number on the sign with permanent marker. Then he smoothed clear packing tape over it to ensure it didn’t wash off. I prayed that God would bring the right couple to our house.
A week or two later, a couple who happened to be driving by saw the sign, so they turned into our cul-de-sac to copy down the phone number, but the rain had washed it off anyway. From the road they could see Floyd working on the porch, so they turned into the driveway and drove up to the house. We showed them through the house, as messy as it was, and they bought it.
With God all things are possible. For whatever reason, He wanted us to leave Valdosta and not look back. We lived in Valdosta a total of six years. Both our girls were born there. That city has a lot of memories. But I’ve never regretted selling the house and trailer. What amazes me so much is how God did it all.