It was the spring of 1994. We had sensed God telling us to move our family of five small children out of south Florida. We didn’t have any idea where he wanted us to move, but we knew he wanted us to step out in faith. So we put our house on the market.

We were scraping by in life and the house needed help before people saw it. Seeing our impossible timeline, our friends descended on it and painted it in a day (see the first 3:30 minutes of the video from 32 years ago). Preparing to sell it, our house became a corporate project.

We were nervous - would it sell? Or what if it sold and we had to leave right away, where would we move? We didn’t even have a town in mind.

A couple of things had happened to bring Gainesville, GA to the forefront, though. We’d made a strong connection with a local church called Praise Fellowship. One Sunday we’d gone there and the guest preacher asked us to stand up. We did so and he gave us a prophetic word about establishing roots and finding provision. It seemed like God telling us to trust him.

Back in Florida, our fears were realized - a few weeks went by and one couple came to look at our home and loved it. They said, “We’ll buy it if you can move out immediately.”

Yikes! What to do? Karen and I and our five children would be homeless. We prayed and, feeling like God wanted us to keep walking in faith, we agreed to their terms.

Now the reality of our situation hit Karen and I. We would have to leave and go somewhere with all of our kids and furniture in just a few short weeks. As we prayed, we thought God might be directing us to move near Atlanta, but still didn’t know what town. We liked Gainesville, but then Rome or Athens (Georgia, not Europe) had their attractions as well.

We’d already looked around Gainesville, but couldn’t find what we were looking for. Our budget was tight and we felt like building on some land would be the best option. One cool thing that had happened - we had met a couple at a dinner party - Barry and Bridget Connor. Barry and I had really hit it off. As a strong Christian and a home builder, he made this offer, “If you find a piece of property in the area that you want to build on, we’ll build it for you at cost.”

Gainesville seemed like it could be the right town if we could only find the right property!

A week went by, then two weeks. With all these question marks and the clock ticking down, Karen was starting to get antsy. One night as we were going to bed she said, “I just read a book by Dick Eastman where they were in a situation like ours and he anointed a map with oil and God answered his prayer. I’m going to do that, and what’s more, I think that we should pray for a dream.”

We had never prayed for a dream before; I was skeptical. “That’s great dear, I’ll pray that God gives you a dream tonight.”

“No, I’m going to pray that you get the dream!” she exclaimed, and proceeded to pray right then before we went to sleep.

About 6 a.m. the following morning I woke up from a dream, “Karen, wake up, I just had the dream!”

“What are you talking about?” She muttered from under the pillow.

“The dream you prayed for - I had it! There was a guy named Tom that we bought the property from and a big tower behind the house.”

Who knew if the dream was legit or not - I was just glad I had it. I wrote out the details of the dream in my journal and kept living my life.

A week later, through a series of miracles, I found exactly the right property in Gainesville. But I was on a quick visit and didn’t have time to meet with the owner and so, had to return to Florida without making an offer. The next week, we loaded up the U-haul with all our furniture and drove back. I was thinking, "This better work, we've got nowhere else to go!"

I parked the truck out of sight and negotiated with the owner and he accepted our price.

The funny thing is, in all the commotion, I completely forgot about the dream.

Years later, I was reading my journal and bam! I connected the dots - we had in fact bought the property from a guy named Tom! And what about the tower? Though there wasn’t one at the time, years after our move, the telephone company built a huge tower near an adjoining property.

Pretty wild, huh? You can draw your own conclusions about God giving us dreams or not, but after experiencing that, it’s a settled issue for the Barnes family.