My dear wife and I are in the process of downsizing from a four bedroom house to a two bedroom, 800 square foot apartment. The next several blogs will deal with some lessons we are learning in this process.
We recently spent about ten days in Pittsburgh doing three things:
1. Packing and planning for the remaining furniture to be moved to our current home in Syracuse
2. Removing the residuals of forty years of marriage that we could not move into our apartment
3. Beginning to prepare our house to be on the real estate market as soon as possible.
In the process of accomplishing phase #2, we had a moving sale over two days. We did pretty well with it actually. Our marketing plan was very well thought out. We simply put the sale on Craig's List and purchased two bright orange poster boards. We already had the markers, so the budget for this enterprise was 99 cents. Remarkably, we netted almost $600 from the sale.(excluding the exorbitant marketing costs)
A young father came by with his five year old son, Matthew. I was intrigued by the patient way this Dad taught his son about the tools I had for sale, etc. In an attempt to break the ice on a more serious note, I shared with Matthew that I knew of a book by his same name. Then I pulled out my newly acquired Blackberry and opened up the Bible to the book of Matthew. We began to talk about the book and how it had the same name as he did. The Dad then said to his son, "You know about that book from church. Right?" We had a delightful conversation and they left with an armoire that has been in our family for many years. But more importantly, I learned that every opportunity is a witnessing opportunity if you look closely for the way to approach it and are sensitive the Holy Spirit!
