January 11 – “Electricity”

This morning at church I got to read a letter.  Seaside has had some rocky times this year, especially since the storm.  We have had four or five families decide not to return.  Several families of Seaside Christian Academy students lost homes and businesses, so they are behind on tuition.  We planned to build the SCA building without borrowing any money.  That commitment may mean we have to postpone opening the building until we can raise enough funds or arrange for enough volunteer labor and donated supplies.  The international economic crash hasn't helped much, either.  Things look pretty bleak from our perspective.  This last week I received from our treasurer a year-end report of giving receipts and expenditures.  Best I could tell, it showed that we were about $9,000 under budget for the year.  I was actually pretty pleased.  It sure could have been worse.  And then we got a letter.   The letter was addressed to the pastor, so I got to open it.  The first thing I noticed was that it was postmarked December 26.  The day after Christmas.  Wonder why it took so long to get here?  I'm not going to say the name of the person it was from.  I'm not sure how "In cognito" they want to be.  But in a nutshell, they heard about the hurricane and felt led by God to help.  And included with the letter was a check for $25,000.  Yesterday it had appeared that we were $9,000 under budget.  Today – suddenly – God was $16,000 over budget! Once again he showed us just how AWEsome he really is.   We went to the house after lunch.  We walked inside and there stood our contractor.  He was measuring windows.  He said, "How about plugging something in and trying out the electricity?"  I grabbed a fan, plugged it in and turned it on.  Nothing.  It hit me, though … I had to flip the breaker on.  Sure enough, the fan began to whir and stir and blow.  We had electricity.  Chris said, "This ranks right up there with having a grandbaby."  I'm not sure I would agree with that.  At least not this week.  But I sure do catch the sentiment.  We have waited a long time to get hooked back into the electric system.  It was always the "out there" goal that would finally show we were really going to rebuild, really going to get back into our house.  And now we had it.  And not only that, our contractor reminded us that we had a materials delivery scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning, and his framing crew could begin soon after that.  Sure made scraping tile a little easier with something like that to look forward to.        Habbakkuk 3:2 says, "Lord, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord.  Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy."   Father, I stand in awe of you, as well … again.  Amen.