God Gives the Best Deals!

Well, I promised I would write and tell you how God gave us a 15 passenger van. There might be some skeptics out there who would say it is all coincidence but I beg to differ. I believe God gave us this van because He is our Daddy God and when He sends you out to do something, He is going to supply the tools you need.
Right now it is 1:15 am but I am still up! It is VERY quiet around here and I can think in one string of thought for the first time today! We are on vacation this week, so there is not much structure going on, therefore no time is allotted for peace and quiet.
I'll write more about vacation later.
Any way, about the van. We got a call from the car salesman who leased us our Toyota Sequoia. He made us an offer that sounded too good to be true. We could turn in our leased car EARLY (which doesn't expire until Feb. 2009) with no early turn in penalty, no broken pieces penalty and no over mileage penalty, if we lease or buy another car from them. We have loved the SUV. It has leather seats,(easy to keep clean with children) video screens and video game outlets(easy to keep kids entertained on road trips), along with seating 8 people(fits our family) but we knew we would need a larger vehicle once the other kids got home even though we have considered just having two SUV's like we do now. It would be sort of inconvenient doing it that way, especially after we tried it on our last vacation. Driving two vehicles was a pain.(Especially since I greatly dislike driving)
Before I move on in the story, I need to go back a little here and tell you something that happened several months ago. Back when we started the adoption process of the kids, we knew we would need a LARGER vehicle. We already fill the largest family vehicle they make.
So, being the prepared person that I am, I started looking. I looked on ebay, I looked in the local paper, I looked at local car dealers, I looked for FOR SALE signs in van windows. I test drove some, and had other friends test drive some in other states. I was looking everywhere. I was going to find that van that we needed but never did ilike any of them.
One day I was praying and telling God about the van and I clearly hear in my Spirit. "Stop looking for a van, I will bring it to you when it is time, just wait and trust me."
"Ok, I am handing it over to you" was my reply. And I can honestly say, I handed it over to God and stopped looking. (God sort of helped me with that too by sending me to Africa for 4 months, because you can't really look for a van there now can you?) Ha!Ha!
I had sort of been obsessed about it, I couldn't go any where without scanning the roads and
So, back to the day Duane got the call. Duane explained to him, thanks for the offer but we had planned on trading in the SUV for something larger like uh, a passenger van because of the high number of occupants of our household. Of course, the sales man wasn't too thrilled but said he wanted to check into something and would call us back. A few days later we got another call. J. said, that the Toyota dealership also owned a GM dealership and if we turned in our Toyota, we could buy a GM vehicle and still get the deal. AND... GM was running a special on Employee pricing. It still sounded too good to be true, so Duane told J. to run the numbers and get back to us. J. ran the numbers and here is what happened. We turned in our leased vehicle, which was badly broken: Back windshield wiper and sprayer- broken, video game plugin- broken, cigarette lighter/outlets- all broken but one, Back window rolling down- broken, marker and pen marks all over the seats, outside of car- badly scratched and dented from fast ramping by boys on bikes,
Carpet with spilled and caked food and drink.--- With NO Penalties for THAT!
AND we had NO penalties for going WAY OVER on the mileage allowed as well as the fees that would have applied had we normally turned in our car early or decided not to buy after the lease.
Then in its place, they happened to have on the lot next door at the GM place, a 2008, white 15 passenger van that drives as smooth as any SUV I have ever driven. Because of the employee pricing, we did not have to pay any money down and our payments are $300 less than the SUV we had! AMAZING! God is awesome!
This van is NICER than any van I ever looked at! God knows how to give good gifts to his children! We sure are grateful!
So...... I am thinking, " Hmmm, God said,"I will give it to you when it is time", that must mean my babies are coming home soon!!!! yipeee!!!
Then the next day, I got the email telling me that Isaiah's passport would be finalized on September 22!
WOW!
I am still learning to drive the thing. Since I used to drive an Excursion(Which I loved), it is not too hard to drive. I still take up two parking spaces right now just to be safe. LOL.
The first time the kids and I got in to drive it, I settled in and glanced in my rearview mirror to see something pretty funny. All the kids had spread out and pretty much claimed a row except for Eli and were distributed evenly across the van. I pretended to be a pilot and asked all passengers to keep their seat belt fastened for take off and thanked them for distributing their weight evenly across the vehicle. I then went on to tell them that I hoped they enjoyed their ride and would ride with Carter's Taxi Service again. Of course, they thought I was funny and we took off. We drove around the neighborhood for about 10 minutes and went home. Eli was totally disappointed. He piped up saying something like this. "Why we back home? We didn't go any where! What we doin'? I wanna ride some more."
I really do feel like We need some type of blue or colored line down the side with something written on it. Maybe later. Of course, our license plate, "THE BUS" does now officially reside on "a bus". Well, I really need to get to bed, It is after 2 am and we have a busy, funfilled day tomorrow! sides of roads for big vans.