Winter is fast approaching. We've had a couple of light snows in the past week, and the nights are getting cold - last night it dropped down into the 20's (for those of you in Florida, that's Fahrenheit not Celsius). Our wood stove works great, although I'm still trying to figure out how to get the heat to move upstairs. I ordered a fan unit that fits under the stove and blows the hot air out into the room - and hopefully up the stairway as well. The only hitch is that someone (me) has to get up in the middle of the night to stoke the fire again - otherwise it goes out sometime around midnight. One of our neighbors gave me a small cast iron stove that I want to clean up, repaint and put in front of our upstairs fireplace to add some heat. My goal is to deprive Colorado Natural Gas from any of my hard-earned cash.
Ever since we moved to our current home Daphne has been worried about using our driveway in the winter. It's 200 yards long, and drops off steeply on one side. It's true that once the road freezes (and because it's shaded by the trees all year) it stays that way all winter. It can get pretty slippery driving in and out, and she's afraid of sliding over the edge and into the trees below. She's been asking me to widen it since last winter, and finally last week the church graciously offered to help us rent a mini-excavator so I could dig into the hillside. I loved it! Every guy needs to drive some kind of earth-moving equipment at least once in his lifetime just for the experience. Course, it would have been even better to drive a bulldozer, but I'll save that for another day. The mini-excavator was all the weight my truck could handle, and even that much weight almost led to a disaster. I didn't want to attempt to back the trailer with the excavator down our long driveway, so I parked my truck and the trailer on the side of the road. The county has recently improved our road by adding a couple of feet of compacted dirt to the surface, but at the same time they created a steeper drop-off on each side of the road. After I parked I lowered the gate on the trailer and got into the excavator to drive it off the ramp. Just as I started down the ramp, I realized that the whole trailer - and my truck - were moving backwards. The weight of the machine on the end of the trailer was pushing my truck towards the edge of the road and a very steep incline. I panicked and tried to back the machine up onto the trailer, but we started sliding even faster. Funny how many thoughts can go through your mind in a split-second: I imagined my truck, the trailer and me in the excavator all falling down into the ravine with catastrophic results. I yelled "Oh _______!" (expletive deleted) and jumped off. Everything stopped. I ran back to the truck and threw it into reverse, but the tires just spun - then I realized that the trailer was actually lifting my rear tires off the ground. I stood there and "pondered" the situation for a few seconds, and realized that the only solution was to move the excavator off the trailer as fast as I could, and pray the truck didn't slide too far. Full speed on that machine is about 1. 3 miles an hour, so the five seconds it took to drive it down the ramp were the longest of my life. The truck did slide some more, but not too far.
I dug out as much of the hillside as I could in three hours, leaving big piles of dirt the whole length of the driveway. Yesterday my neighbor Brian came with his skidster and pushed all the dirt over the side of the hill, so our driveway now looks like a superhighway! Daphne can hug the hill-side and feel more secure this winter.
Tonight I'll be speaking again at our Wednesday evening service. The title of the series is "Jesus According to John", and we're looking at who Jesus is through the eyes of His Beloved Disciple John. I found a great resource on the internet recently: it's the whole gospel of John in one, three hour movie. Every word spoken by the actors is taken literally from the Scriptures, and each week I'm able to show a short clip of the particular passage I'm teaching from. It's a great visual tool. Our attendance has increased each week - the first week we had seven, then ten, and last Wednesday 18 people came. I would love to fill up our meeting room each week. The format and teaching are very different from Sunday mornings too. We're very relaxed on Wednesdays, and I'm able to go deeper into the background and context of a passage than Mike can do on Sunday mornings. The crowd is different as well, because Saturday nights and Sunday mornings are more directed towards the unchurched or de-churched folks who make up the majority of those who attend The Journey; Wednesday evening is mostly more mature believers who want to dig deeper into the Bible.
I love it, and I can't wait for this evening.
No comments:
Post a Comment