When it all goes wrong

A couple of Saturdays ago, I was getting ready to sit down for the afternoon. I had just been to my son Josiah's football (soccer) match, and I was now settling down to prepare myself for the next Sunday morning when I was scheduled to speak at the church that we attend. I was just coming into the house from my office, which is across the back garden, when I noticed what looked like the remains of Josiah's bath water sitting all over the pathway around the down pipe from the upstairs bathroom. Well... we had been experiencing mysterious leaks in various pipes during the past few days, so this confirmed that something was very wrong. I had to acknowledge that we had drain problems. After my father-in-law and I made a couple of futile attempts to clear it, I called a real drain company to come in and fix the problem. The man arrived a couple hours later and quickly set to work on clearing my drains. He began using a very, very long plunging device with great gusto. I could hear all kinds of noise under the ground, and he assured me this was the pipe beginning to clear itself. It looked like he had the problem in hand, so I went inside to fix him a coffee while he was working. To my intense horror, as I walked into the kitchen, I saw that raw sewage was all over the sink area. I opened cupboards and found that the pressure of his plunging had forced this same sewage through every seam in the pipes, and we had the same unpleasant material all over the cupboards under the sink and everywhere in the cupboard where the washing machine sits. I went running out and asked the man if this should be happening. His reply was something along the lines of: "Definitely not. That is 100% wrong. It shouldn't be happening." I was relieved to hear that.

After a quick look over the situation, his conclusion was that something was badly wrong with the way our pipes worked. (I had come to that same conclusion myself.) We began the work of cleaning up the grand mess. He didn't stay as long as I would have liked, and I was left to the task of removing all the sewage from every possible nook and cranny. You see, we are in the process of selling our house, and the idea of people coming to view our house while it smelled like a decaying herd of buffalo didn't seem like a great idea.

The next 48 hours were hugely unpleasant ones for me and my wife, Pippa. We used bleach, pine-scent cleaner, more bleach, dog smell remover, more bleach. You get the idea. Slowly but surely things began to return to normal--apart from the fact that some frying pans were thrown away, since Pippa categorically refused to ever use them again for food that we would consume.

Three days later, the drain company came back and fixed the problem with our kitchen pipes. It needed to be done. We had not been aware of the cause of some minor problems we have had for some time in the kitchen, but when the BIG problem came, it allowed us to find the real problem and FIX it. Now, a couple of weeks later, the smell in the kitchen is pleasant and resembles food cooking rather than animals hibernating. And all the drains in the house, not just the kitchen, are working much better than they were before the catastrophe.

I realise that a few blocked drains is a minor problem in light of world peace or pandemic bird flu. But I can assure that for those 48 hours, we thought it was a pretty big problem. All of us have situations in our lives that sometimes go disastrously wrong--it may be a relationship, our health, a work situation, or any one of a hundred other things. The point is we live in a fallen world, and things often don't work out quite like we plan or hope.

What do we do when it all goes wrong? Sometimes, like in our situation, the big problem is an indication that something needs to be fixed. The little problems were there, but they were small enough that we were able to overlook or ignore them. Many times, maybe most of the time, this is true of the things in our lives. God often allows situations to get to the point where we can't ignore them any longer. Maybe we need to humble ourselves in a way that we haven't before, maybe we need to reconsider our priorities in life, or maybe we need to sit still and listen to God in case he has something that he has been trying to say for some time.

The other side of it is that sometimes there isn't always an easy answer like the "drain man" so quickly gave us. Sometimes we have to say, "I'm not sure, but God is still God." There may not always be a quick and simple answer, but even if mountains are giving way and the earth is shaking, God is still God (Psalm 46). He is faithful all the time.

As our world becomes increasingly unstable, and uncertainty causes a lot of people to live stress-filled lives, it is vital that we keep our minds set on the eternal nature of God and realise that he is indeed working all things to the good. It is entirely possible that things are going to get even more shaky. Those are the times when God is our shelter and rock of safety. He is in the process of conforming us to the likeness of his Son, and whether in good times or bad, his eternal purposes are certain to be fulfilled. That's a comforting thought.