Eight Acres

Meet the newest addition to buncharunyons! Last Wednesday we became the proud owners of eight acres of lovely land, complete with a 1/2 acre lake and two resident geese.

How it came to be ours is quite a story.

If you have read my blog for any time at all you know we have had some trouble with attachment with our adopted children. The Lord laid on my heart a great burden for helping children in foster care, as well as adopted children and their families who are in the midst of attachment difficulties. While praying about what to do with this burden, I became aware of equine therapy, and felt the gentle nudge of the Lord that this was something I needed to look into.

I sent Michael an email and told him what the Lord was showing me...and asked him to pray about it. The next day I wanted to delete the email. Was I out of my mind??? We don't even know anything about horses! But while God had been working on me, He had also been working on Michael and to my surprise, Michael's response was to buy me a book about horses. It was his way of saying "I'm in".

Not knowing what God was up to, we continued to pray. Soon after, we came upon a piece of land- 8 acres. Both of us felt it was the perfect location for what the Lord was calling us to do: easy access to an interstate and surrounded by farm fields on two sides. It was absolutely lovely. Michael decided to contact the realtor and inquire about it. We knew we could only purchase the land contract for deed, and that the payment we could afford was well, rather paltry. Yet our attitude remained that if this was how God was leading then certainly He would open the doors, and we prayed that if it wasn't His will that He would firmly close the door. As it turns out, the realtor owned the land...and he and his wife had been planning to build a home on it...and build a stable to have horses for therapy! Michael told him how much we could afford monthly, and to our surprise, their current monthly payment, including property taxes, was exactly the amount we could pay.

Our vision is to have horses and a stable for therapy as well as a building with a rock climbing wall, and other fun things that families can use to build trust with their children. We hope to also have a guest house where families can come and be ministered to.

For now, we wait on the Lord to show us what to do next, but in the meantime we are having so much fun playing on the land. We have a multitude of bullfrog tadpoles in the lake and discovered yesterday, when we took our homeschool friends along, that the geese had a nest on the peninsula! We have seen deer tracks and scat, mushrooms, ferns and moss. It's a delight for this Charlotte Mason lover...and the mud, well, that's a delight for all of my kids...the dog...and Michael!