"The Miracle in the Mud"
I want to share a story that happened last month, before I began this blog. As July drew to a close, our team spent time preparing the site for our buildings while we waited to finally get our long-awaited building permit from the city that would allow us to start pouring the cement footings and moving our buildings onto the pads. The last couple weeks had been hot and dry, and the property was as hard-baked as could be as our builder bored the 240 holes in the first pad for the footers.

These holes are then filled with cement, and used as a foundation for the cinderblock columns supporting the building to stand on. As you might remember, that Thursday night we got one of the heaviest rain storms to hit this year. When I drove out to the site at sunrise the next morning, nearly all of the 240 holes were completely filled with water, and the property was so muddy that by the time I had walked over to the pad, I was walking on an inch or more of muck caked to the bottom of my shoes. When Brad arrived, he explained the how bad the situation was. Even if we pumped the water out of the holes, each one of them would need to have all the mud shoveled from the bottom of the holes to make a clean surface for the cement. We had the building inspector coming by at 12:30 to inspect the pads and had until 1pm to cancel our cement order, so we only had a couple hours to get all the holes clean. The forecast called for additional rain, and if we got more rain before the cement was poured, all our work would be lost. Finally, even if the building inspector passed our footers, we could not get a cement truck close enough to the pad to pour the cement without that truck getting stuck in the mud -- cement trucks extremely heavy and are very difficult and expensive to tow. It looked like we would have to wait until Monday to get started, but our schedule is tight and we discussed our options. I took a moment to pray and ask God to show us the way to go. We decided to get a crew pumping water out of the holes and cleaning them while we worked on the other issues. Without a way to get cement to the holes, were stuck. We quick ruled out doing it manually, when we calculated that it would take over 1000 full wheelbarrows to fill the 240 holes. As we were discussing it, the first section of our building arrived on the site. Watching the semi struggle to back the trailer a few feet onto the ground is it sunk into the mud just underscored the challenge. Our only other option was to try to get a cement pumper truck. These trucks can pump cement through a hose over a long distance and would allow us to pour the cement from a firmer location, but they usually require a week or more in advance to schedule. As we called around looking for one, we found that the rain had forced a cancellation at another site and they in fact had a pump truck free for that afternoon!

When the inspector arrived, Brad's team had pumped dry and cleaned out almost all of the footers, and the inspector gave us the go-ahead to order the cement as the last few holes were being cleaned out.

We now considered out next problem -- how to get the cement and pump trucks close to the pad. Our asphalt driveway was too far away for the pumper, and the mud was too thick to drive them closer. I called Troy Early, who had a tractor on the site he was using to prepare the fields, and he volunteered to come out and use his equipment to scrape the layer of mud off a path up to the pad. Once he removed that inch or two of mud from the path, we had a hard layer to drive on.

Though the sky threatened to rain a few times that day, the weather held up through that afternoon when the pump truck arrived and set up. The truck looks like a large fire truck with an extending arm. After a long day of working through so many challenges, it was indescribably beautiful!

The first cement truck driver took a little convincing, but he drove up to the pump with no problems, and the workers started quickly filling the holes and smoothing out the footers.

An hour (and three cement trucks) later, the pad had been poured and Trinity's trek to Baileywick road had stayed on schedule.

As I prayed thanks to God, I felt he showed me that regardless of how fine our plans were and how good a team we assembled, we are completely dependent on Him for our success. I found a stick and scratched Phi 4:13 into one of the corner footers as a reminder that "I can do everything through him who gives me strength".

Please continue to lift up our project in prayer. A list of prayer requests is in the left margin of this page.