How God Works

It's a bit of a story, what happened last week, but worth the tell:

Two years ago we hired a contractor with a very good reputation to remodel this house so we could move into it. At first all went well. As time went on, however, there were more and more problems. To keep a long story VERY short, we ended up getting $40,000 off the final bill due to mistakes that had been made!

Needless to say, this definitely soured us on this contractor. The interesting thing was he is the son of the owner of the company, who has spent years building an excellent reputation here in the valley. His son seems to be destroying it...

And there it sat for about a year. We had moved in in May of 2005 and spent time getting the yard and all set up. The first year went by uneventfully.

This past June I noticed that the kitchen vinyl had a sort of puffy spot near a counter. I stepped on it, and it gave, and then when I took my foot off, it came up again. I showed it to Barry.

We called the company who had installed it. Believe it or not, for this and that reason, they didn't manage to get a guy out here until a couple of weeks ago. He noticed that on the other side of the wall, in the utility room, in front of the sink area, the vinyl was also 'puffing.'

Water. We had a leak in the wall somewhere.

"Barry, you get to be the one to call the contractor. I don't want to ever talk to that guy again....!"

So he did. And the dad sent another son out to take a look. This son was courteous and prompt and had the plumber out the same day and by that evening had located the leak, which was fixed the next day.

That was nice, but that is not the "God part" of the story. The young man was talking to Barry and Barry was explaining about some of his work. The young man was very interested, but Barry did not have time to explain as he had to leave to teach astronomy at the observatory that evening. So I talked a bit to the young man.

"You are a Christian, right?"

His hand did that hold-out-flat-wiggly thing. "Not really. I'm trying to find things out for myself."

I complimented him on that and we started a long conversation. He wanted to know very much what the truth was and why we believed as we did. We talked and, when the plumber was done, I sent him home with a couple of books to skim through.

He'll be back because the wall still needs to be repaired, as does the flooring, on both sides of the wall. But just think -- if his brother had not been such a goof-up, the leak probably would not have happened and we probably would not have had the chance to encourage this young man to seek the truth and point him in the direction of Christ.

In all things give thanks. It was hard to when we discovered the leak and knew that a lot of stuff was going to have to be ripped up and re-done, but the contractor is paying for it all and in the meantime, God had his own purposes for that silly leak.

One more person to encourage. One more person to help find the truth in Christ.