The first house Nancy and I bought was a little thing, about 930 square feet. Not only was it small, but it was also a fixer-upper, which we proceeded to do. Some good friends had helped us get our start, and we were resolved to make the most of the opportunity their kindness had provided. We had a standard mortgage on the home, but I didn’t want to owe money on the house for more than six years (taking my cue from certain helpful hints found in the Mosaic code). I had also done the math, and knew how much money we were actually going to pay if we stayed there, which was not anywhere near the same as the sticker price on the house. So we worked on fixing up that house, about which I might tell some other fun stories some other time. After six years, we put it up for sale and what with the equity and sweat equity, we came out pretty well, at least for us.
With that money, we were able to buy three acres in the country, outside of town. It is not outside of town now, but at the time we were surrounded by wheat fields. The plan was to rent a house in town, which we did, and build a house on our property as we could afford the materials. We had a driveway cut, and a well dug — and then it started to get interesting. This was during Nate’s junior high and high school years, so this was his shop class. I, his instructor in this shop class, was also enrolled in the shop class. We developed a number of traditions in our work together, such as, whenever a nail went singing off across the way, the person not guilty would offer encouragement by saying, “Great Scott, whut aire ye duin?” Since then Nate has done quite a bit of work on his own, and when he discovered the existence of nail guns, and realized that we pounded all the nails at our house the old-fashioned way, he has been fairly snippy about it.
We chipped away at this project for about five years, building as we could afford to. When we were within shouting distance of the end, some other friends gave us a short term loan to finish out, which we did.
But the point of all this build up is to tell a story that happened about halfway through the project, a story that illustrates the kindness of God in remarkable ways. Our house is on a hill, with the front door facing west, which is where most of our weather comes from. We had the basic framing done, and the wood sheathing for the roof was on. We had the corners braced but, as it turns out, not very well. To the east of the house was the downward slope, heading down to the bottom of a pretty big hill. So what we had built was a big fifty-foot-wide hang-glider made out of wood, perched on the crest of the hill. Just raring to go.
Well, during the course of one Saturday night, we had a big wind storm come through — winds of sixty mph or so. When we got up Sunday morning (back at our rental), we got a phone call from the neighbor out at our new place, and he said something like, “Well, it looks like the storm has moved your house.” “How far?” was my reasonable question. “It looks like a foot or two,” he said.
Now this was Sunday morning, and I had to go preach in just a few hours. But before church, I needed to drive out to the site to see what had happened. Nancy and I prayed, not knowing what the damage was going to be, or how much labor was down the tubes. We thanked the Lord for His goodness to us, whatever form that goodness might have taken.
Now it was around this time that our church was first recovering the use of psalms in worship. We were very new at it, and this is where the Lord’s encouragement came in. We had learned a version of Psalm 148 that was set to the tune of “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” a version that, as it happens, we no longer sing. But as I was driving to our broken house, feeling kind of numb, I found myself singing Psalm 148, not deliberately, or with any purpose in mind, but just because. But the reason God put that psalm in my mind became obvious to me right as I sang a line from it that I will never forget — “Stormy winds that do His pleasure.” What a gift that was.
And when I got there, sure enough, the whole second story of the house was leaning eastward, yearning for an excuse to do somersaults down the slope of our hill. Just a few more gusts of wind during the night might have done the trick. The top of the house was probably a couple of feet out of plumb, but the base of the framing was all, miraculously, still attached.
And in yet another kindness from the Lord, the neighbor who had called me showed up when I was walking around in my new lean-to. We attached a come-along to the far wall, and in about ten minutes the entire house was back where we had initially put it.
God is good.