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After being married for one year and finishing college in southern California, Chris and I knew that we wanted to move to Missouri to be near family.  We chose Columbia because of the University where we planned to work on our Masters degrees.  We wanted to wait for a year so that we could have state residency, so after our arrival we started job hunting.  Yes, we were young and wet behind the ears and moved out here with a Hertz truck with all our earthly possessions, and no jobs or a place to live (Hertz and apartment stories for another MBM). We both signed up with temp agencies and started getting calls right away.  Chris got a temp job answering phone calls for an upstart company named Carfax.  The show 60 Minutes had just aired with a news piece on this company you could call to see if your used car was a lemon.  Temp help was needed to answer all the 1-800 calls that came flooding in.  After the calls started to subside and other temps were let go, the office manager kept finding things for Chris to do.  He was a good worker and worth keeping around. Chris has always enjoyed computers and the Carfax office had plenty of computer work to do.  He was eventually offered a permanent job which we were so grateful for and excited about.  He quickly came to realize that his heart was more into computer work than pursuing a Masters in Psychology.  His gifts and talents lie much more in this area and we are so thankful for the way God gently guided him into this field.  The rest is really history as Chris has now been with Carfax for sixteen years. We cannot begin to list all the ways this job has been a blessing to our family.  God has shown his faithfulness time and time again.  Chris mostly works 40 hour weeks and is home with family the rest of the time.  His work rarely requires travel.  His schedule is very flexible so that he is able to take off easily when we have doctor’s appointments and such.  He is blessed with lots of vacation time that has enabled us to take many memorable family trips and to be gone for 3-4 weeks at a time.  The financial impact has been incredible as well, allowing me to stay home ever since Michaela was born (another MBM story!), allowing for trips to Japan, and helping to provide for two adoptions. God, we praise You for your sovereignty in guiding us when we had our own plans.  We praise You for providing for our family through the blessing of Chris’ job.  We praise You for blessings uncountable that go above our simple needs.  Our latest standing stone is a Carfax car so others may see it and allow us opportunities to share Your goodness to us.

Please refer to my original Memorial Box Monday post or to Linny’s blog to read more about a Memorial Box.

I’m excited to tell you about the next Standing Stone we have added to our Memorial Box!

In the fall of 2001we had a five year old, a three year old, and a 6 month old.  Our little blue house was starting to feel a bit cramped and we prayed about finding a new home that our family would be able to grow in.  We really thought that “grow” meant that our three kiddos would grow in size, not grow as in number of kids, but that’s a story for another Memorial Box Monday. 

We got our house ready to put on the market and started watching the real estate listings that came up.  We weren’t quite ready to buy yet,  as we wanted to sell our old house first and wanted to save up just a bit more cash, but a home that we had spotted and thought would be perfect for us came up and we asked our real estate agent for a tour.  This was the very first home we toured, and as we looked around we just knew this was “the one”.  It had so much that we had prayed for and desired.  It had great square footage, it was located on a few beautifully wooded acres, it was just outside of town yet still close to everything, and had so many other neat specs. We made an offer on the house, but sadly it was declined because we made the offer with the contingency of our old home selling and another offer had gone in at the same time for a higher amount.  We were disappointed, but trusted that God had something just as right for us.

For the next six months we continued our house search.  Our old home sold (hey, that’s another MB story!), we moved into a duplex temporarily, and we toured and drove by countless other homes.  Each home was compared to the very first home we had toured and fallen in love with.  I scoured the new listings on-line daily and we continued to pray.  In May of 2002 I spotted a new listing as it came up in the afternoon.  (Yes, I knew exactly when the listings were updated daily!)  It looked like a possibility so that afternoon we drove by to check it out.  As we drove up the road that the house was on we crossed under some telephone wires overhead.  There were a few pigeons and one white dove sitting on the wire.  Chris laughed and said, “Hey, that’s a sign.  There’s a white dove.”  I laughed it off, too.

As soon as we pulled down the beautiful wooded driveway we were more excited.  The surrounding woods were gorgeous and there were even deer in the front yard that we spooked off.  We arranged to see the inside of the house immediately.  This house was even better than the standard we had compared everything to in just about every aspect.  The rooms were bigger, the property had more acreage, the location and neighborhood were better than we imagined and so much more.  Here’s the kicker.  Aside from the little white dove, the house number of the very first house was 6200 and the house number of this house in the woods was 6200.  We knew we had multiple signs from God that we had found just what He wanted to provide for us.  It was better than we imagined.  God is awesome and wants to give us much more than we imagine, just in His perfect timing.

So in our Memorial Box we have a little white dove that is our standing stone representing the wonderful gift of this home that He so perfectly provided for our family in which to grow, not only in physical size of the kids, but also in number of children.  We are filling it up!

Hard picture to take, but I wanted to get the dove (on the flower box) with 6200.

Have you ever had something on your “to do” list for a long time?  I mean a LONG time.  I have had the idea of a Memorial Box on my “to do” list for 10+ years and I am finally able to check it off.  Woo hoo!  I am so excited about this and plan to make several posts about our Memorial Box in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.

Chris and I originally heard about the idea of having a family Memorial Box when we took Gary Ezzo’s class, Growing Kids God’s Way, when Michaela and Benjamin were tiny.  The idea struck a chord with us as something we wanted to do.  A few years later we were reminded again of Standing Stones through an excellent video series with Ray Vander Laan, Faith Lessons.  I kept this idea in the back of my mind and was recently reminded of it again through a bloggy friend’s encouragement.  Linny does a great job of explaining a Memorial Box here, but I’ll try to just explain it briefly.

In Joshua 3 the Israelites had finally entered the Promised Land by way of the miraculous parting of the Jordan River.  Joshua directed them to choose twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan and to set them down at their camp as a sign.  He said, “In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them…….These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”   (4:6-7)

The most important thing for Chris and me as we raise our children is that we share our faith with them.  Our faith is real and we want to give real examples of how God has been faithful to us; how He has miraculously provided, how He has worked in our lives, how He has demonstrated his love to us.  Our children have themselves experienced many of these examples of faith.  It is important to talk about them and remind ourselves of how good our God is and how active He is in our lives.

So we have been on a Wolfe family mission recently and finally found what will be our family Memorial Box.  We can’t wait to fill it with our Standing Stones!  These will be visual reminders for us and we will tell and retell their corresponding stories as our children or others ask, “What do these stones mean?”

Okay, so here is our first  Standing Stone story.  These stories will be in no particular order, but they all testify to God’s real presence in our family.

A year and a half ago we were in the waiting stages of Elijah’s adoption.  We had already done all of our paperwork, but Elijah’s paperwork in China had not been completed yet.  We had no promises whatsoever from their gov’t that we would be matched with him, we just knew that God has led us to Elijah and that he was our son.  We had already put a lot of money on the line in full faith that God would work to make this adoption a reality.  If you know anything about international adoption you know it isn’t cheap, but a mommy and daddy have to do what they have to do, right?  It’s not like we have several grand sitting around, but we had faith that God would provide.  We trusted that God would provide the monetary means, but we had no thought that he would provide in other ways as well.

Are you ready for this?  We received literally a year’s worth of toilet paper for free!  That is a story in and of itself, but in a nutshell we had a friend that was moving and somehow had all this toilet paper in his attic.  He told us to take it and we gladly loaded Chris’ little pick-up with toilet paper rolls and moved it to our attic.  I kid you not, this toilet paper lasted us exactly a year!  Oh, and there were a bunch of Kleenex boxes and paper towel rolls as well that lasted close to a year.  Does God have a sense of humor or what?  We laughed about it but we also rejoiced over it because we saw it as a sign from Him that He was watching out for us and would provide.   This provision wasn’t in greenbacks, but it did save us a lot of greenbacks that we would have had to spend and instead were able to apply toward our adoption expenses.  In our obedience to the calling of adoption, He proved Himself to be faithful.  So the first Standing Stone placed in our Memorial Box is a toilet paper tube.  God is faithful in big and small ways!