by Tom Brown
(Corning, NY)
And if life was not interesting enough yet, God decided to make it more interesting still. October 2006, Shawnie asked me what I thought about moving to Elmira, NY so that our kids could grow up next to their cousins. Immediately, it felt right. So we started laying the groundwork to move right after school ended for the girls in the summer of 2007. I gave my company a 7 month notice. For some reason they did not believe me. One week later, I was tested. I was offered a new job with a base salary of $150,000 with commissions that would easily put me in the $250k-350k range. I turned it down. All my friends said I/we were crazy. But this move had been placed on our hearts by God and I/we would listen. Lots of roadblocks started to appear, but disappeared as we got closer. We needed to sell the house of course. We talked to a realtor and he gave us some tips and told us to contact him in February. When February came up, and we told him we were leaving May 30, he said there was a problem. Houses in our market and price range were on the market for an average 8-10 months before being sold. We prayed. We listed the house as soon as we could which happened to be April. We sold the house in six days, for our asking price minus $400 for the home buyer to put in new grass. Unbelievable. Shawnie had already found us a house in NY. We visited in March and loved it. We were not allowed to make an offer until our other house sold.