"This is just like the movie, The Money Pit," I had told one of my co-workers.
We laughed and joked about it for a while, but when I sat alone the crushing pressure seemed unbearable. My thoughts hung low and thick like a tropical storm. Every step immediately became a misstep, or so it seemed. I had always been very conservative financially, and had no idea how quickly years of savings could evaporate.
"Why did we move here?" I said to myself as I gathered my things at the end of the day.
During my commute home thoughts bounced around in my brain, everything from selling out to getting a second job. The phone rang.
"Are you almost home?" It was Julie. "The girls have a surprise for you,"
I had left a little early, and traffic was light. "I should be there in about twenty minutes," I replied.
I came in through the side door, because the front door was stuck. The cowbell Julie had placed at the top of the door made a soft clunking noise.
"Dad! Check it out!" Bella stormed from the mud room and grasped my hand, tugging me to the back of the house.
A large plastic storage bin sat on a wire shelf. Clamped on the shelf above a heat lamp blazed into the bin.
"Scratch, thump, thump, cheep, thump, cheep, cheep," Strange sounds rose from the bin, which shook ever so slightly with each "thump". The light of the lamp created tiny scurrying silhouettes on the plastic. Gazing in I took in the six fuzzy chicks, pecking, hopping and having a great time.
I on the other hand was not having such a great time.
"What am I supposed to do with these chicks?" I whispered to Julie.
"Build a coop," she replied. It will be fun.
Time passed, and the chicks grew. It wouldn't be long before they would be graduating to a new home, but I hadn't built or bought anything. I really didn't have any spare cash with all of the unplanned repairs we had just experienced on this wonderful home.
"God, please help me figure out these chickens," I had prayed more than once.
One evening while leaving work I spied a pallet leaning against a dumpster. "I bet I could use that to build the chicken coop," I thought to myself. Jamming it into the back of my Prius I headed home.
Designed to hold industrial equipment this was no ordinary pallet. Four by four runners and two by six cross members made this an extremely heavy and heavy duty foundation for the chicken coop.
"Thud!' The pallet scratched my bumper and smashed into the gravel driveway. As I tried to carry it through the chain-link gate it snagged on this trashy 4' by 6' section of an old privacy fence. The nasty thing was wedged between a tree and the fence. Vines had grown up around and through it. I had noticed it the first day we moved in, and had planned to trash it, but had not gotten around to it. "I need throw that piece of junk away," I thought to myself.
"What are you doing with that?" Julie asked as I drug the pallet to the backyard.
"This is our chicken coop," I replied. She didn't look like she believed me. Actually, I really had no plan at this point, but for some reason, I felt like this was an answer to my prayers.
The pallet sat untouched in the back for a couple of weeks. One morning over a cup of coffee I sat gazing out of the back window when an idea came to me. I quickly grabbed some paper and sketched it out. Soon I had marked out a plan for a dollhouse looking structure with a sloped roof. Maybe we could paint it blue to match our house.
I leveled the foundation with some concrete stepping stones, then spent the morning framing the coop with discarded wood from our recent home repairs. It wasn't long before the structure was nearly complete, but I was quickly running out of materials.
"Just go to Home Depot and get what you need," Julie said.
"No, I'm not going to buy any wood," I replied. "I'm tired of spending all of our money on this place, and I don't have any extra cash for a chicken coop,"
Julie just stared at me with this impatient look she sometimes gets.
"Besides, I continued, "I am confident that God is going to take care of us in spite of this chicken coop. I'll figure it out,"
Julie widened her stance, her hands on her hips. "God has your wood alright. It's at Home Depot," she said.
"I'm not going!" I replied a little too harshly and started gathering up my tools.
"I hate it when you talk like that," she said.
The next morning my oldest daughter, Morgan, and I worked together on the coop. We had completed all but one side with plywood sheets, but I was out of wood. I was about to put up my tools, when I saw it, the trashy 4' by 6' fence section cluttering up my yard.
"Hey Morgan. Check out that section of fence. I bet it will work perfectly for the last side of our chicken coop,"
Sure enough, this piece of "trash" that I passed every day intending to throw away, fit perfectly. As we continued our project we still found ourselves short of supplies. The pen needed to be framed, but we had no more wood.
That afternoon our neighbor, Trisha, peeked her head over the fence. "What are your building?" she asked.
We told her about our coop, and she shared stories of building her own. On her way back inside she turned around.
"I have a bunch of old wood in the corner. Take all you need," So amazing. So kind. I hadn't even told her we had run out of wood.
As I was finishing up the chicken wire around the pen, Julie came into the backyard to check our progress.
"I saw an old screen door in someone's trash on Virginia," she said. "Do you want it?"
"I can't take anymore trash. I've got too much of my own," I replied.
Julie gazed at the coop for a moment, I'm sure thinking how I had constructed it primarily of "trash". "You'll need a door on the pen," she said. "You said God was going to take care of you,"
I stopped working and looked up at her.
"Maybe you should get the door," she said.
"I think you're right,"
