God Uses Leaky Pipes

Recently Katie and I decided that we really needed to plug into the friendships in our immendiate area more. To built the friendships with the great citizens of wilmington / claymont and those other towns nearby and be commited to fellowship here. You know, Acts, early church style. Eating together, doing life together, seeking God together. So this leads into the following story:

So on Thursday when I had two projects to get done at work that were pretty much going to get done at the last minute rush, with lots of anxiety in my heart, I get a call from my wife. She lets me know that the carpet is all wet around the baby's room and a little into the "orange" room. I start trying to figure out what happened and first my mind goes to the radiant heat. We have no basement, so we have a slab on grade and hot water pipes run through the slab to heat our house. Second I think of the outside faucet.

So in the midst of my craziness and work, getting this news only put me more into a frenzy, so I could finish up and rush home to try and figure out what happened and hopefully stop the water from drenching our carpets anymore. In the meantime I was getting short with Katie and was definitally starting to get angry / impatient.

After I got home I turned off all the water to the house and ripped a hole in the wall where the leak was and realized it was the outside faucet which I am guessing had frozen and cracked the pipe and was now leaking into the house. The best part of this is that the pipe runs IN the slab so the pipe also cracked the concrete and the only way to actually fix or get to the pipe is break the floor slab which is not too great idea when you also have radiant heat.

After the rush of the moment calmed down and I kind-of had everything under control, I realized that I had sinned against Katie when I was on the phone at work, so I needed to apologize / ask for forgiviness for that, but still we were both kind of bummed out about the whole thing, becuase we had no water. We didnt have a shut-off valve for the outside faucet so I had to turn all the water off for the whole house. We would turn it on for brief periods, put some towels over the leak and get showers real quick and fill up some pots.

Eventually God started speaking to us. Good ol' James 1: "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. " I think of the big things in life when I think of this verse, but really, these small mundane trials happen a lot more, so God uses them just as much!

The next day we went Skiing with my work and just left the water off. On saturday morning Katie said, " Hey this will be a great, we can really start this whole fellowship thing we were talking about. About living life together. We can go get showers at someones house." I thought it was great how Katie was thinking about how God was using this actually as a blessing and turning our minds towards that.

Next, it was my mission to try and figure out the pipes of my house and I couldn't figure out where the pipe went down into the slab. I even drew up a AutoCAD, to scale, drawing of our house to help figure this out. I knew where the water came into the house and tried to follow it around. After putting two more holes in the walls I thought for sure that the pipe went down into the slab at a certain point where I would probably have to make a hole behind the refriderator through the tiled wall, which I really didnt want to do.

As a last resort I opened up the access panel in the closet that gives access to the pipes for the shower. And what did I find? Another pipe running off of the cold water pipe into the shower that lead down into the slab, and that pipe had a shut off valve!! So I tried it and it shut the outside faucet off! I was pretty excited, I think I did a little victory dance. I was master of my domain. I turned off the water to the outside faucet and turned back on the main water. How thankful we were for that running water that night.

Anyway, so now we dont have a front outside faucet. I will eventually cap that one and abandon it and will most likely run a whole new pipe up into the attic and down to the outside. My dad says they make new pipe that is like a glorified hose that can do that.

So the moral of that long story is. God uses trials to test us. He desires that we be people that reflect his glory and goodness and he promises to work on us until perfection, like a refiners fire. And even though we didnt get to shower at one of our neighbors houses, we were reminded that we really do need to live life with these people whom God has put in our lives.

Thanks for reading! - Steve