E HAD JUST BEEN CONVERTED for a few months when our faith was tested with several major trials.
Actually, that whole year had been an emotional roller coaster ride. In the spring, I had contracted an infection from a tooth extraction, and was in the hospital for almost two weeks. When my sister came to visit me, she told me that the new highway, Interstate 81, was going to cut right through the road she lived on. We had property on that road, and we had hoped to build on it. At first I was very disappointed, but my sister came up with an excellent idea.
She said the two houses that had to be removed for the highway were put up for bid. One was sold for the materials, and she suggested that we put a bid in for the other one, and move it down to our property. I was immediately intrigued with that idea. But how do you put a bid in for a house, and how do you move one with solid plaster walls and stucco on the outside? I couldn't wait to get home and start working on the plan.
As summer turned into fall, we completed the negotiations with the contractor, and sold whatever we could to come up with the cash. We finally got a bill of sale for the house. Next we had to move it, but we needed to have a new basement built first. The winter was coming on, and the contractor's schedule demanded the house be removed immediately or it would be bulldozed down.
We hired a mover, and they began working on both properties. They were knocking out the foundation under the house so they could back the semi under it. They were also building footings for the foundation on our property.
In the meantime, we told our landlord in the city that we would be moving by early spring. We had never had a lease before, but now he wanted us to sign a year's lease or move by the end of December. We couldn't sign the lease, so we asked my sister if we could move in with her until the house was livable. She lived just a little way down the road from where we were moving the house. She agreed, and we started moving all our furniture into the house while it was still on its old foundation.
We had just had a snowstorm, and when we backed the truck up a bank to unload the furniture into our house, the truck began to slide sideways down the bank. My husband was on the lower side of the truck and tried to hold it up with his hands. I immediately thought of Uzzah trying to steady the ark, and I was very grateful that the truck didn't roll over on him. We safely unloaded the furniture into a house that was almost completely separated from its foundation. Now it had to be moved with all our furniture in it.
The last night we left the city, we had all our delicate glassware and fragile things in the car. It was December 24, and we were traveling on a curving, icy road. My three-year old daughter was standing in front of me close to the windshield. I put my arms around her, and pulled her up on my lap, holding her tightly because she wanted to keep standing there. This was before seat belts.
Just as we started over the crest of a hill, we saw that a car up ahead had stopped to let out a passenger. The car in front of us was brand new, right out of the showroom. He stopped, and we stopped, but the car behind us didn't. He hit us and drove us into the car in front of us. Our car was totaled, but no one was hurt. So now we didn't have a home to live in, or a car to drive.
My husband was a truck driver, and he was gone most of the week. I had to make all kinds of decisions on the spot. We had two children, and we were living in two rooms in my sister's house until April. When it came time for the truck to move the house, with our furniture in it, down to our property, I got my movie camera out. This was also before camcorders, but I wanted my husband to see it. It was a bitterly cold day, and the truck driver had to drive down a hill and through rough ground about 1,000 ft. to our property, and then back it onto stacks of railroad cribbing 15 feet high. There was only one foot of space on each side of the truck's wheels. When the driver tried to back onto the cribbing the first time, it started to shift, and he had to pull off. They rearranged the cribbing, and he backed onto it again. This time it held, and they immediately jacked the house down off the truck. When the driver pulled the flatbed off the cribbing, the sweat was pouring off his face. I don't think I breathed the whole time!
The pictures showed the whole house swaying back and forth on the way down to our property, and the cribbing shifting under the weight of the truck, the house and our furniture. To this day, when I view those movies, I can feel the tension of watching our house and all our furniture teeter over a 15-foot deep hole in the ground, especially since we couldn't get insurance on it that way.
Well, we thought we had it made by then, and soon would be able to get the house hooked up to the well and septic system. But as the contractors built the basement up to the house, we began to get spring rains. We had more thunderstorms that spring than I could ever remember. At one point, our 1,000 gallon concrete septic tank started floating before it could be covered with dirt. Our driveway was a river of mud, and we had to walk across planks to get into the house, because the dirt was too wet to be back-filled against the house.
Finally the rains stopped, we moved into the house, and got the yard in pretty good shape. But then another shoe fell. The water company had purchased the land across the road from us, and was going to drill several very deep wells to supply the small city with water. We had just put in a deep well, with a new pump, and a very good septic system. If the company put those wells in, we would all be in trouble.
I was working for a lawyer at the time, and the neighbors got together and wanted to hire a lawyer to stop the water company from drilling their wells. My sister asked me to set up a meeting with my boss, which I did for that Thursday night. The neighbors didn't like Thursday night, they wanted the meeting on Friday night.
I explained to my sister that I couldn't do that, and wouldn't even attend the meeting on Friday night because it was the Sabbath. She got upset with me because she didn't think I had my priorities straight. They decided to hire another lawyer and move the meeting to Friday night. He charged a lot more than my boss would, and lost the case. But God rewarded us. Even though all our neighbors lost their well water and some had their pumps burned out, we had crystal clear water as long as we lived there. We never had to hook up to the city water, and we were the closest to the wells. The water in that house still is clean and pure. I believe others were also blessed because of our putting God's Sabbath first.
God had protected us through all our trials. My husband wasn't killed by the sliding truck. My daughter wasn't seriously hurt or killed in the car accident. We didn't lose our house or our furniture. We replaced our car with another one. And wherever we have lived since then, we have had clear, delicious well water. God protected us when there was no protection from anywhere else.
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