My Experience Involving Plumbing and Trusting God

Over the last few weeks God has been moving me to step out of my usual relationship with him and give Him my all.

I woke up today with my heart set on serving God with everything in me, and by noon I was feeling rather depressed.

By a rather stupid mishap, I had dumped some pasta sauce into the bathroom sink (I know that makes absolutely no sense to you, but random details that I won't go over now for the sake of keeping this short are involved.)
For some reason I didn't realize that there were chunks of tomatoes in the sauce. As you can imagine, chunks of tomatoes aren't a good thing to drain in your bathroom sink.

Soon I realized that the sink was clogged. Hoo boy. The complete stupidity of what I had just done began to sink in. I rushed to find the plunger. It was in the other bathroom, which someone had locked and shut accidentally. There was no way in. Great, I thought. I found a bobby pin and started trying to pick the lock.

We live in an old house, with old doors, and you guessed it, old locks. Old locks are not easy to pick, my friends. In fact, my little bro Andrew, who is notorious for being able to pick household locks, was unable to pick this door the last time someone had locked it on accident.

After praying for help, and at least 30 minutes of failure, not to mention a nearly broken bobby pin, I opened the door. Whew! Inside the bathroom I found the plunger that belonged in the other bathroom.

So I plunged. And I plunged. And I plunged a little more. This went on for hours. Eventually I realized that my plunging was making the nasty sauce-water come up through the drain of the other sink. Great, great, great. Mom would be home soon. I was prepared to die when she found out what I had done, and that I could not remedy the problem. I remember praying a number of times throughout the whole experience, God, help me pleeeeeeeease. I know it's my fault but seriously I can't do this on my own!

She showed up, and I was still working on a way to fix the problem. She was pretty mad, but I assured her that I would fix it somehow. I ended up having to resort to using the snake. In case you don't know, a "snake" is a rather tedious plumbing tool used to unclog pipes. It is called a snake because it is usually pretty long and, with your help, it "wriggles" down your pipes and breaks up or pushes out whatever is causing the clogging. Needless to say, it's a pain to use.

After hours more of dissembling the pipes under the sink, spraying nasty water all over the bathroom, and attempting to snake out the cloggage, I was still nowhere in terms of fixing the problem. I couldn't even get the snake to go down the right tube! In case you don't know, I'm not the best plumber on the block. My time on the whole project now totaled around 4-5 hours. I gave up. It seemed so out of my control.
My mom was mad, and Dad had to come home from work eventually. I was worried that the problem would turn out to be serious and end up costing money.

After hours of being pretty depressed (no jokes, i almost cried) I realized how stupid it was to be so sad over something that wasn't really so big. Looking back I can't believe I was so torn up over it, it was a little out of character for me. It wasn't like this was somehow going to ruin my life! I might have had to deal with the short term consequences for my foolishness, but in a year I probably would have forgotten it even happened!
I had kept on telling God that I trusted Him with the situation all day, but did I really believe it? In my spirit, yeah, but I was confessing what my flesh was feeling: that the day had been lousy! My twitter status comment detailed the conflict in my heart: "GOD IS GOOD! =) But life is rather lousy today!"

While talking to my sister, I sarcastically commented that today had been a really good day. "Are you serious, or joking?" She asked. Actually, just by joking about it and saying that, I felt a thousand times better. It was at that point that I really turned the day to God. I wasn't afraid of what would happen next anymore. I realized that He would carry me through it. My faith had increased!

Dad got home. He was mad, but not as mad as I had expected. He gave me a little advice on how to get the snake to work for me. At this point, I was ready to stay there all night if I had to. The sink had to be fixed, and my God would be with me. To my surprise, snaking it was really easy this time around. Hallelujah! In under an hour the bathroom was as good as new, or at least as good as it was before I jacked it up.

I'm so thankful right now for the way God stuck with me when I was distraught.
So you're thinking, who gets so caught up over a broken sink?
I agree, the whole thing was pretty dumb, but turned it around as a faith building experience for me, and I learned how to better trust God in a trial.

Praise God!
-Larry