Moving Out: Baby Bird and More!

Well, I don't think the bird made it.  We watched it get this big:

And then a few days later, the nest was kind of disheveled and the baby was no longer there.  Maybe it grew the rest of it's feathers really fast and flew the coop, but we are thinking something got it :(  Sad.  But within a few days we had purple finches nesting in the hanging basket on our front porch, so that has been a blessed distraction!

But really this post isn't just supposed to be about the birds.  It's really about what God has been doing in our life lately!  Our house has been up for sale since the beginning of February, and while we've been waiting for a buyer we've been praying for the sale of our home.  And of course I had heard about burying a St. Joseph statue in the yard....but this seemed like a lot of Catholic nonsense to me!  I mean, here I am making a point every time I speak to someone who may be unfamiliar with what we Catholics actually do to let them know that we don't pray TO the saints, we ask for their intercession.....and we DON'T WORSHIP Mary, we honor her as Jesus' mother, etc., etc.... Well, taking a statue and burying it upside down in the yard to help your house sell sounds a little,...well, superstitious?  Ummm.....rich with Catholic craziness??  But on May 25th, after a friend lent me her statue of Jesus' foster dad, I decided that I would bury the statue and MORE IMPORTANTLY, start a novena....that is 9 days of prayer asking for St. Joseph to intercede (that is to pray to our heavenly Father) that we might in fact sell this house! 

We had a showing that morning.  I buried the statue around 3pm, and by 5pm our real estate agent called to say that the people who had come to look at the house were going to make an offer....and they did. 

I about fell out of my chair. 

I think God was smiling at me that day.  It wasn't so much that I needed to bury a statue in my yard to sell our house.  I think it has more to do with God wanting me to devote some serious prayer time to this petition (more so than my bedtime "oh and please send a buyer for our house"), and that he wanted me to ask other people to pray too (particularly St. Joseph)!  Well, it gets better than that.  We had decided awhile ago that we were going to be changing parishes, and had fallen in love with the atmosphere of respect and reverence that we found at a parish by the name of (none other than) St. Joseph's!  The 9th and last day of our St. Joseph's novena, we attended our first Sunday Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church as parishoners!  I didn't even plan that one out!  But what a cool way to end the novena, starting out at a new church! 

So our house is under contract and fingers crossed that all goes well and we get to close it in mid July.  In the meantime we are packing and figuring out living arrangements, and all kinds of other fun stuff.  God is definitely working out all the details!  And if you want to pray that it all goes according to His plan, I would be grateful!! :)