I can tell you exactly where we'd be. My wonderful husband would have been a widower and fatherless when he got home from work this morning. God is good all the time! It was only about 20 minutes after Mike had gone to work last night. Katie and Hunter were in the den reading books. I have a miserable cold and was getting ready to go lay down on the couch in the living room. For "some" reason (the merciful guidance of the Lord:) I sat down at the piano and decided to go through the piano books that Mike's mom had brought to Katie last November. As I reached down between the piano and the wall, where the books were stacked, I burned my hand! The wall was literally so hot that I could not touch it! Mike had built a fire first thing yesterday morning, but that had been 13 hours ago, and the wood stove was stone cold. To make a long, adrenalin-pumping story short, I called our neighbor, Chris. He came over immediately, knocked a hole in the wall at the hottest point, and after tearing off blackened sheet rock, he discovered a thin metal door. When we moved into this house 5 1/2 years ago, the previous owners had built a wall around where the chimney was. Mike had accessed the front of the chimney where the stovepipe went in, but we were completely unaware that on the backside of the chimney was a metal door used to clean out built up creosote and ashes. It has been building up over the last 6 winters, and was now at least 18 inches of glowing red coals. Chris dumped almost 2 gallons of water down the stove pipe in an attempt to cool the coals down. Then he shoveled the still red-hot coals into a metal 5 gallon bucket . He shovelled out between 7-8 gallons of burning coals. After he had worked over an hour, and I was thanking him profusely, he said that he was glad I had called. Otherwise, he would have woken up to the sound of fire engines in the middle of the night. The chimney goes directly up between Katie and Hunter's bedrooms. All I could picture was Mike driving down our lane and coming upon a burning heap that used to be his home and family. I cannot tell you how thankful we are for God's goodness and protection. As Katie said when I tucked her into bed rather late last night, "Mama, this will be a story that I can tell my children someday." Amen, and thank the Lord!
