Episode Transcript
It is all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea with my story of how I bought my first house. Welcome to miracles in the 21st century.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Many years ago, I had gone up to Cairns to help my mother move into a new house.
At the time, her house that she had put up for sale in order to move to Cairns, the sale had actually fallen through and it had been put up. The house that she was selling went up for sale again. And this put her in a tricky situation now in that she'd signed to buy this new house, but she now didn't have all the money that she needed to buy the house and she needed to raise some money.
Now, at the time, the Australian government was offering a home savings scheme where if you saved up $500, and this was back in the early 1970s, if you saved up $500 for your first home, towards your first home, the government would match that with $500. But you had to show that you'd saved it over two years. And I'd done that, and I have my $500 there.
But if I gave that $500 to my mother, she now had enough money to be able to move into her new house. And so she asked me about this and so I gave her the $500. And I remember we moved in to our new house on a Friday.
And that Friday evening I walked, went for a walk in the evening, praying, because here I was, 27 years of age. I had, or might have been 26 years of age. I had now no money in the bank, no home.
My mother was a widow and I wondered, how would I ever get ahead? How could I ever get a home? Well, a couple of days later, the old man or elderly man who lived in the house next door to the house that my mother had just bought died. And his children came up to deal with the funeral and so forth. And my mother talked to them and said, you know, what are you going to do with the house? And the children said, well, we're just going to sell it.
And it was an older house. It hadn't been kept, you know, really, the maintenance hadn't been kept up to it because this gentleman was well into his 80s, perhaps nearly 90. And so it was certainly in a rundown condition.
And so my mother said to me, john, why don't you buy the house? And I said, well, how can I buy the house? And she said, well, look, you've helped me out. She said, if there's any money left over after I sell my house down at Buluru and after I settle with the house that I've just bought here, you can have what is left over. So with that arrangement she made arrangements with the people next door on my behalf and not so long later the house at Buluru sold.
My mother was able to settle and she had some money left over. Now we had negotiated back in those days a price of $4,000 for the house next door and the and being a full time university student at the time I won a research fellowship. I was a research fellow at the University of Tasmania standing for a doctorate there.
But the under I could go through the public trustee and I can still remember that the total amount that we had to pay for the house was $4,112 and the cheque that my mum got for the solicitor as the leftover balance after settling for her house was $4,112. And so that's how I was able to buy my first house. I returned then to Tasmania and it's interesting that my mother and brother sort of got in and renovated the house and they were able to then rent the house and my mother had that little bit of extra income to support on the pension from the rent from that house.
In the meantime I met a lovely young lady and proposed to her and we were able to sell the house up there and buy our own house where we settled when we were first married. So I praise the Lord for that spectacular answer to my prayer on that Friday night. How about a month later I actually owned a house outright and I'd like to encourage people that there's no problem that's too big for God.
We can take our problems to God and he is there to look after us. This is just one of the many miracles that I've experienced in my life. I'm Dr.
John Ashton, have a great day.
