My life has never been filled with so much blessed mayhem. Where do I begin. I suppose I’ll start at the beginning.
On Febuary 25, my little daughter Katherine was born. You’d think after three children it would become old-hat but nope, she still melts my heart. This has been the best delivery we’ve had yet! Manda’s incision is healing incredibaly well (we have had to have c-sections with all our kids.) and Kate is a wonderful baby (she eats well and only crys when something is actually wrong.) Now your probably thinking “where’s the mayhem in that?”. Well in this case the storm came after the calm… litteraly.
We came home on Friday to our excited children, eager to show them their new baby sister, and had a fun evening spending time as a family and sharing our stories of what we did over the past couple days. The next morning we had to take Kate to go to get a test done. I had asked Kristin, a coworker of mine, to babysit the children for us. As we drove to Warner Robins we hit some rain. No big deal, I’d noticed it was in the forcast. Well we went to do the test and while filling out the paperwork I got a call from Kristin. She’s at our neighbors house with the kids… (strange) because a tree fell on our house, demolished the back pourch and punched a hole in the roof above the kids room… (awesome). Come to find out, that storm we drove through spawned a tornado and the winds coming off of it blew over the two-thirds-rotten pecan tree that lumbers over our house in the back yard. Fun. They also told us that there was an inch of rain in our kitchen and more was on the way.
When I got to the scene the fire department was there finishing up tarping the roof off. They told me that the house was uninhabitable now and we couldn’t live there till repairs were made.
Now, this is where the blessing comes in. The nice thing about living in the country is that just about the whole fire department consisted of members of my church. They put out a message on the chaincall saying I needed help and that they would start work in two hours. I left to look at a trailor one of the brothers offered to let us have and then went to check on Amanda and the kids (i’d left them at our neighbors house.). After two houres came and went, I decided to return to the scene to see if anyone was there. I was shocked to find pretty much the whole church there clearing debri and loading my furnature and belongings into their trailors and trucks. I tried to help but ended up just guiding traffic. Maybe an hour and a half later I went to the new house to help unload to find that the women had cleaned the house from top to bottom and had actually started unloading the first trailor. Wow. In about five or six hours time they moved my entire house to another location. And I’m not just talking boxes on the floor, oh no. I’m talking dishes washed and in the cupboards, pictures on the walls, curtainrods hung up, food in the fridge, beds asembled and made, tools put in the shed, windows washed, floors swept, and lots of other things to boot! Now, I still have a lot to do mine you, but it would have taken
Me two solid weeks to do what they did on six hours. What a blessing. This is part of what a real brotherhood is all about.
If any of you guys are reading this, I love you… really. Maybe you could say that “the way to a man’s heart is through recovering him from his disaster”
I really don’t know what I would have done since Manda is still healing and not able to take care of her stuff.
God, if your reading this too, thanks, I love you too.

Oh I forgot about the pictures! Here they are.