The Flood

We rent space under a hardware store as an office, library, classroom. Among other things, it is where we have the once a month class for pastors. Today was the first day of classes for the second group of pastors (Wednesday/Thursday). We parked up by the hardware store and I noticed a stream of water flowing beside the car. I mentioned to John that I hoped that water didn't mean anything in particular. It did. We walked down the hill to the entrance to the office, opened the door and discovered water everywhere. Someone in the hardware store had forgotten to turn off a water valve the night before and water had overflowed a storage tank, leaked down the walls, and dripped off the beams into out office below, probably most of the night. We had learned, from a similar event earlier the importance of not having any bookshelves against walls, so most of the books were okay. A lot of things got wet but few things were ruined. If it had happened a week ago, when we had been out of town, things would have been sitting in water all that time, so we are counting our blessings. We are also thinking that this is not a safe place to have a lot of books, and are going to see if we can find any other place to move the office.
Basically, we mopped the floor, wiped off what we could, set things out to dry and went on with class. The men were having a ball learning to use a Vine's Dictionary and Strong's Concordance. Three ladies came this week. We studied the doctrine of Christ in the morning (though somehow we got sidetracked into talking about marriage relationships), baked a cake in the afternoon and decorated it as we had in the first group. This evening we shared the cake and talked as couples about issues affecting marriages in their churches. Tomorrow we will finish up, pray together, and they will leave about 10am to get home. Then John and I will take a better look at what to do about the flood.