Do The Saints Work For Presbyterians?

It was taking too long to sell our house so we asked for help from an unusual source.

I thought the house would sell quicker, we had it on the market before the spring selling season but, maybe, not long enough before the start of the season. In any event I was getting impatient. The thing is we can’t start either our journey to the new world, Montana, or the building of the new house until we sell the old one.

The New York home isn’t very fancy and not “what people are looking for.” It’s a ranch style and, it seems, New Yorker's are more into farm-style houses these days. Interesting since maybe only 1 in 100 have ever been on a farm. In any event, the ranch style went out of style with leisure suits. I had one of those too but that’s another blog.

Our listing was generating ‘lookers’, we had thirty showings and almost all said “maybe”. The house was showing well. That’s nice, but I wasn’t interested in lookers, I wanted a buyer. What could we do to generate a buyer?

• Redo the kitchen with granite and new cabinets? Did that.
• Redo the bathrooms? Did that.
• How about new flooring throughout? Yea, we did that also.

Actually, the house looks better than when I had it built thirty or so years ago. Even the grass was growing in the backyard, in itself a minor miracle.

So how do you generate a buyer in a buyer’s market?

Enter St Joseph.

I grew up as a Presbyterian and, at least in my experience, we do not have saints. I don’t know why, perhaps it has something to do with Calvinistic origins. I just know that a Presbyterian service goes right to the top and doesn’t use saints as intermediaries.

St Joseph is the patron saint of workers. He seems also to be the patron saint of house sellers. The former I could understand, after all he was a carpenter. How the later came about I have no idea. None the less, the story goes that if you buy a statue of St. Joseph and bury it upside down next to the for sale sign he will help. What did we have to lose?
We ordered our saint statue online and it arrived the next day, interesting since we didn’t pay for overnight. We dug a shallow hole, buried St Joe upside down and read the prayer included with the statue.

I wasn’t holding out much hope but I was willing to try anything to move the process along. The next day we received an offer on the house. In fact, we also received and accepted an offer on some upstate property that had been for sale for well over a year.

Do saints look out for Presbyterians? I certainly don’t have all the answers but I just wanted to say thanks to St Joe.

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