The winds brought cold water

The past few weeks have been weeks of interesting challenges. Two weeks ago was our experience with internet fasting - definitely a positive experience. This past week was a bit colder outside and a bit colder on the inside too. This past week we spent without hot water. Really it was only three nights, but those three nights were the coldest we've had so far in SoCal.

The first night, when we'd decided the water was definitely not going to heat up no matter how long we waited, we all took the trek outside to the water heater - Curtis decided to make the journey shirtless. Needless to say, we didn't find any warming news. The burner was rusted and covered in a puddle of water.

What really matters though, isn't that we found the problem, or that we didn't really know what to do. What matters is that the next night the youth group was over - and their leader had a friend in construction.

The water heater here heats water for three houses. It's big. When Matthew went to look at new water heaters the prices he was seeing were somewhere around $3,000 for a replacement. But that friend, the one who works in construction, offered to help us out - and showed us where the pros shop and the water heaters cost $1,200.

How could any of us have known when the youth group started coming what a resource it would turn out to be? There are so many surprises here in everything!

We recently finished reading Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. It's definitely a hard book to get your head around - but here was our first glimpse of what he was talking about. Here was our first glimpse of the old adage: "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." It's all so simple - yet so simply incomprehensible. It reminds me of the part of the book where Shane talks about a conversation with his pastor, early on in his journey, when he asks why there are no miracles. The answer is simple - there still are, just as there were back in the day, but we are all so insulated in our checks and balances and our reserves and excess that we don't see them anymore. I think there is truth to that. I know there is.

How easily could we have gone out and bought that water heater and made our budget stretch around it rather than asking some advice in the matter? It's so easy now to crawl online and answer all of our questions - our hyper connectivity has separated us all. So what if we stepped back and started talking again? What would that look like?