Be Unconventional
2) Don’t go about things in the expected manner.
In our search for a country home, we knew we couldn’t afford the typical way of doing things: take out a loan on an existing house and spend 30 years paying it off. No bank would loan us that much — or, if they would (as they did prior to the 2007 housing bubble debacle) we at least had sense enough to know this was financially foolish.
Instead, we lived simply before it was fashionable, saving every penny and dime while our peers bought multiple cars and went out for dinner. When the sellers of the land we wanted, incessantly in need of money, split the property in two and raised the price on each — we snatched up the half-piece, with enough saved money to pay most of the purchase price. A bare land loan from a small local bank did the rest.
We built our house by sweat equity with a contractor who trained us to do a lot of the work ourselves. In the two years it took to get it livable, all six of us shared 1,000 square feet of rustically renovated barn living space. People — including many Christians — observed that we were “different” from anyone else they knew:
“Do not conform any more to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12: 2). This verse can be practically, as well as spiritually, applied.
