The Lord Always Answers Our Prayers

The Lord will always answer our prayers. Sometimes it isn't in the way we expected or in the time frame we would like but they are always answered.
You may remember a blog entry a while back called "I Have Changed" about my longing for a Suburban. This week the Lord taught our family a wonderful but hard lesson. We were driving past a dealership on Tuesday and stopped to look at yet another one. This one was a Yukon XL and happened to have everything we are looking for. We know we are getting close but didn't think we were quite there. But close enough to check and see how much they wanted. They were just sure they could get things worked out for us so we left the dealership with that beautiful Yukon XL! Our kids were so excited! So were Jeron and I. This was putting us on the path to so many things that we would like to do as a family. A couple of days later we got a call from the dealership. They wanted $100 more a month in a payment. Well, that just doesn't fit into the budget so... long story short, we took back the beautiful Yukon XL.
It is funny. I have prayed and cried so much this week, and it was all over a CAR! I honestly can't believe that. What was amazing to me was that as we prayed (even the kids) we didn't pray to be able to find a way to keep the car we prayed to know what the Lord wanted us to do. That we would do what would be best for our family. I was amazed at my children. Porter came to me at one point and said, "Mom, it doesn't really matter what kind of car that we have. Just that we have a car!" At one point we had the kids say a prayer without us. We asked them to ask Heavenly Father to help Jeron and I know what we should do. It was then that we found peace and saw the direction that we needed to go.
I have to say that this is one of those rare times I can say I am thankful for our trials. It was a hard lesson to learn, for our whole family. I was wishing earlier that we hadn't brought it home. That we had told the dealership we needed to talk more about it. But I realized at church today that then we would have missed the lesson as a family. Jeron and I might have learned something but our kids wouldn't have. As much as I would love to shelter them from the hard things in life I won't always be able to. And because of the way things worked out we were able to teach them a valuable life lesson, and they were able to teach me some too!
So after the longest test drive of my life we do know this is what we want and what will be right for our family some day, just not today. As a family we are choosing to look at it as the right car, wrong time!