Living in "our world"

When my third child was about three years old he had this adorable habit of declaring, "Now we're back in our world!" whenever we exited the freeway near our house. He recognized the gas station on the corner and the Old Navy store across the street and he knew that he was almost home. That freeway exit has changed dramatically over the past few years, the gas station has been torn down and the quaint stoplight is gone in favor of the much touted "diverging diamond interchange". But we still have that same comforting feeling of being almost home whenever we come through that intersection.

I love living here. The kids love their school. We're close to shopping areas, the local library and the community pool. We have the greatest friends and neighbors anyone could hope for and in my humble opinion, we live in one of the best wards in the entire church. This town really has become "our world."

But it almost wasn't.

Two weeks before we put on offer on the house in which we now live, we offered on another house in another town several miles from here. Our offer was initially accepted but ultimately the deal fell through. When we decided to walk away from that house I felt a great deal of relief although I didn't quite know why. I actually liked the house quite a bit. It was larger than the house we ended up buying. It had an extra bedroom and a family room big enough to put a ping pong table in (and our current home definitely does not!). It had a nice big fireplace, a craft room and a great backyard. But it just wasn't meant to be.

Today I happened to be driving near that other house so I took a detour through the neighborhood to get another look at the place that was almost our home. The cute little red brick house was exactly as I remembered it. I looked around at the other homes--the ones where my dear friends and neighbors DON'T live--and I wondered what our life would have been like if we had ended up living here instead. Who would our friends have been? Would we have made the same life decisions in this house? Would we have been as happy here? What if THIS place had been "our world"?

As I drove away I thought about the lucky turn of events that led us to the house we currently call home. And of course, I realized that luck probably had nothing to do with it. It made me think of Elder Bednar's message about revelation from General Conference this past weekend. He talked about how revelation often comes to us so subtly, line upon line, that we may not even recognize it as revelation.

I never had a grand moment of revelation pointing me to choose the house in which we now live. But numerous prayers and small nudgings of guidance and acting on faith helped us to find the place we needed to be.

Doctrine and Covenants 6:14 really seems to speak to me today.

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, blessed art thou for what thou hast done; for thou hast inquired of me, and behold, as often as thou hast inquired thou hast received instruction of my Spirit. If it had not been so, thou wouldst not have come to the place where thou art at this time.

So we can't have a ping pong table and my boys have to share a room and this might not even be the house we stay in forever, but for now it's where we're supposed to be. And I love it. It's our whole world!