Stranger than fiction
It’s the end of the semester, and that usually means I begin plucking out the hairs on my head, slowly, methodically and painfully until I’ve rid myself of all the annoying strands of protein and their little follicles, too.
It’s kind of maddening this time of year.
There are funny spots, though. One of them is the circumstances surrounding our recent move to apartment 39 (down the street from former apartment 23).
It was a Tuesday night, and my family and I were on an outing with my new boss, the seminary Vice-President for Institutional Advancement, who is a great guy and who I’m looking forward to working with (you reading this, Lou?) At any rate, we were having Chinese food and laughing it up…< forshadowing > enjoying ourselves while a foul evil was lurking in our home. </ forshadowing >
It was about 9:30 p.m. and our boys were grumpy and tired, and we reluctantly returned home.
I left a little ahead of Jess, who was carrying Abby while I took the two boys with me. I arrived in the house and immediately noticed a foul smell. My first thought was, “Wow…did we forget to take out the dirty diapers?” I realized, though, this smell was a bit too strong for even the worst of Caleb’s poopy diapers.
I stood in the foyer and got the boys’ shoes off and as I happened to look down into the basement (where all of the bedrooms are, consequently), I noticed a sheen that wasn’t characteristic of our carpet, and after cutting the light on, realized that we had a small creek of very bad liquid — in this case, sewage — pumping slowly into the rooms where we sleep.
Needless to say, we weren’t sleeping there tonight. I heard the pump outside going, and called to our maintenance man, begging him to stop. It wasn’t long before the boys were screaming, tired out of their minds, and Jess arrived home exhausted. I luckily shifted into task mode, and began the quick but arduous process of finding us a place to sleep. We were able to grab a free guest room at the seminary, a kitchen efficiency that was roomy enough and that had a VCR where Brendan and Caleb could watch Blue’s Clues for the next two days.
Long story short, we were moving the next day and we had almost a dozen people show up (on less than a couple hours notice) to help us move. It was funny, too, that everyone in our complex got hit by the sewage but we got it the worst. I told Dr. Blackaby God must’ve thought we were pretty special to allow us to get the worst of it. He said (jokingly…sort of) that I probably needed the character-building worse than anyone else.
We’re still sorting through the boxes, but I can’t help but laugh when I think about all we’ve been through this year. Both of my wife’s grandparents died (not that it’s funny, mind you); the car has quit on us in minus 20 degrees and snow…not to mention our anti-freeze fiasco; we’ve had a baby girl that we thought we would wait forever for; we’ve been sick more times than Liz Taylor’s been married; and we’re thousands of miles away from home when it all hits the fan.
In the midst of it all, though, I really have to say that God is good. Whether character-building, disciplining or spiritual blessing, I know He’s at work in me.
In times like these, that’s a comforting thought.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2004 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Home Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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