The Spirit in the Middle of Damage ...

Friday, June 21, 2013. Last evening we had severe thunderstorms in our area. Heavy rain pored down for two hours, and the whole house seemed to be shaking. We went to bed before midnight, but then, my wife woke me up at 12:30 …

Damage …

Our cellar was filled with a layer of water, at least 2cm, in some parts up to 10cm of water everywhere. The water had been coming out of the pipes, in particular one of the sinks and one of the toilets.

My first reaction was: I will go back to bed, I cannot change that anyway. But then we started to ship water and tried to clean our cellar. From 12:30 to 3am I shipped water into buckets, and the buckets into the toilet, which luckily had started to work again, since the rain had become less severe.

So we shipped and shipped, until we had the main part of the water removed. Still, 50 square metres which had carpets are sucking wet, and water is standing in one of the rooms … but we also made a lot of progress in the middle of the night.

Spiritual dimension?! …

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What is the difference writing about the holy spirit on a day, where everything seems fine, in contrast to a day where you are just faced with quite significant personal damage? We can basically throw away the carpets in the bottom floor, and also a lot of things which are now wet and dirty.

Yesterday I have been singing an old hymn, which spoke about God's power to change the life of every individual in an instance. He can make the poor rich and the rich poor, without any difficulty. This night, some sense of this has come to us. It did not completely change our fate, but it will change the way we see our cellar, the way we deal with our house. The damage does have a spiritual dimension!

We have bought the house just three years ago, and so far only one room in the cellar was wet sometimes, but it seemed to be contained. Now, we know that the water can be quite high, and it can happen any time during summer thunderstorms. There is no point of putting many ressources in to renovate this part.

But it also tells us: focus on the important parts of life. No one was hurt. Only rather cheap carpets have been destroyed. And we should really not put too much effort and focus on our posessions, every day they can be gone, they can cease to be a help, but become much work and trouble. But the Lord will be with us in all of this, and it is his guidance, which we see in it, even when he takes away a good part of our night sleep. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts