Co-WHAT?

We weren't even looking yet. We were still just focussed on selling. But it landed in our laps. I mean, it really did. It just *plop* landed there, and of course we had to choose to pick it up and examine it, but there it was, looking delicious and juicy, and how could we resist?

We didn't. I'll be honest. It is actually hard for us to even believe, but we didn't resist. I mean, why bother resisting when something looks and feels so right?

Co-housing.

Co-what-ing?

Co-HOUSING.

Hm. Where to start. Back a few months I think.

Ryan came home one day, early in our journey here, perhaps our house had been on the market for a month, and said that he heard about an interesting way of living. There was this guy who he had met through work who lived in this community in a nearby city.

Blah, I thought. Too far away. Isn't one of our non-negotiables that we're staying in this area? Yes. So don't even toy with it. Besides, haven't you NEVER been open to living in community? We've explored this before. Silly thought. End of conversation.

(That would be me, the harsh wife.)

A few months later, much further into our little journey of learning how to trust and open our hands, Ryan comes home again and tells me of a coffee he had with this same guy, and how they exchanged stories, and that he's heard more about this community the guy lives in. He's kind of intrigued, and this time I am too. Why? Because we're living with our hands open. We're trying not to control. We're trying not to shut doors that are opened for us.

And so I ask, and he answers, and we send an email to this guy. There's a community event, open to anyone. It's a Robbie Burns night - Scottish theme, celtic music, Haggis, dancing - we should come. We swallow and accept.

It's a Saturday night and we have NO idea what to expect. We are let in the locked doors of the common building and enter the dining room that has a little stage area where there are three community members performing some numbers on various celtic instruments. There's singing, accordion, bodhran, and irish pipes. A number of people sit around, least of which is not a 6-year-old girl who spies our daughters and makes a bee-line. Within minutes they are all gone - disappeared through a door into the common kids playroom and running up and down the open area of the common house. They're in heaven. We sit and enjoy the music, meet a few people around us, and then the tables are cleared, dessert is served, and the Scottish folk dancing begins. We and the girls join in and dance a few numbers before it's getting late and we need to go. Before we do, we get a tour of the place and hear about the community. It's a group of people who simply don't accept that life should be lived in isolation, in our own little homes, shut out from the rest of the world. They want people, they want care, they want a village. Some people want it because they're raising kids. Some people want it because they're ageing. All of them contribute in various ways and all of them seemed to respect, no deeply care for, one another.

We bid them farewell and drove home, girls all happily sleepy and us all giddy and giggling. Did we really want this? Wasn't this the furthest thing from what we were looking for? Weren't we looking for a tiny place that was near where we lived now? What did this mean?

Let me shed some light here. It was entirely unusual that we, both individually and as a pair, were even remotely interested in this. I was so clearly unwilling to look anywhere but in our immediate neighbourhood. Ryan was very clearly unwilling to step into any kind of sharing of life situation. We had beed down that road before, when I thought it would be great, he recoiled and backed away. I had long given up the desire to co-live simply because I didn't think we'd be able to pull it off as a couple.

And so the mere fact that we both felt so compelled, and after only one short evening, was quite significant to us both. And because we were in a time of such deep intuition, listening, praying, meditating on God and what He might be opening up for us, we were deeply aware that this place, this unique community of people, might just be the place we were being directed to. At very least, we couldn't just pass it up, and at very most, we had to consider that perhaps this was IT.

And so we continued in the journey to find out more. We visited again a few days later, in the daytime, and saw the property, drilled them with questions. "What's the hardest part about living in community?" "What's it like to have kids here?" "What's the demographic age-wise?" "Faith-wise?" "Work-wise?" "What are the benefits of this lifestyle?" "How is conflict dealt with?" The questions went on and on, and the more answers we received, the more comfortable and confident we felt in our desire to live there.

We met more people, went to more events, and learned of a 4-bedroom unit coming up for sale. We inquired, and learned that there were a couple other families interested. There would be an open house. They would let us know the price when it was set.

It was all very exciting and yet we had no idea what our chances were.

Two days before the open house, we learned the price. It worked for us. Then the open house. We finally got to see the unit that we were desiring. How strange to want to live in a place that we had never even seen!

It blew away our expectations. We put in an offer that very day, as had one other family.

We got it.

In a month, a whirlwind month, we had gone from hearing about this co-housing idea to purchasing. Sounds fast, I know. We are SO excited.

We chuckle as we see how the chains we have wrapped around our "plans" have been slowly unshackled and released. We laugh, knowing those plans were never true plans anyway, because this wasn't a journey towards OUR values. This is a journey towards God. It's a time of learning, of humility, of allowing our own simple views die and adopting the longing for His ideas to take charge of our hearts.

And so, come July, our co-housing journey will begin. We need to sell our house, but we think we can. I mean, if this truly is where He'll have us, won't He work that out too? We think so, but He sometimes has different things up His sleeve.