By: Garrett Vickrey
What could be worse than the smell of wet carpet? Wet carpet that still hasn’t dried three days later.
San Antonio was blessed (or blasted) by rain a few weeks ago. Around the church we had about ten inches of rain. David, Mylene, and Mike Elliot came up to the church Saturday to change out the sanctuary banners for Sunday morning. Thankfully, they came Saturday night and not Sunday morning. They came in through the administration building and found the floor to be sloshy. Before long we had a group assembled at the church to assess the situation. Ramiro was out of town this past weekend. So Debra Arredondo, Joe Manuel, and I met up at the church to try to make a plan. Joe started cleaning up and putting out fans. David Elliot began sucking up water with the carpet cleaner. I brought my brother-in-law with me, and he took a turn on the carpet cleaner too. Debra worked the phones to try to get carpet cleaners out to the church ASAP. Within 2 hours we had carpet cleaners in the building setting up fans and humidifiers.
We decided to go ahead with Sunday School the next morning. Thankfully, the sanctuary was dry so worship was not affected. But, we had Sunday School classes meeting in every nook and cranny of the church. Ellen and Lance ran around putting up signs and directing people to classes. Classes moved, classes combined. All in all, it was a pretty crazy morning.
We got through it and church happened. Church happened because Woodland is flooded with the Holy Spirit. I’m reminded of it constantly. I was reminded that Saturday night when I met Joe, Debra, David, Mylene, and Mike at church. And I was reminded the next day when a father and son showed up in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday to clear the sidewalks of mud and sweep the sand and rubble from the prayer garden path back in the garden and off the parking lot. I was reminded that our church is flooded with the Spirit yesterday as I read a thank you note to our church from Buckner International in response of our gift of $7,500 to them for ministering to children at the Community Transformation Center down on the border.
The Spirit is here. May we never dry it up, fan it out, or dehumidify it. Lets dive in together.
On another note: The Spurs are headed for the finals. That’s not lost on me. I’m considering a few blog posts on basketball during the NBA Finals. I’m feeling good about the Spurs chances, and feeling great about cheering against the Heat.