Our Crate Experience

I wish that it could be said that it was a “great” experience but that wouldn’t be true from the typical human point of view. But when you see it from God’s perspective you see that He was giving us opportunities to trust Him and watch Him work. From the very beginning, because of where we live, there had been one obstacle after another to get over - obstacles that the Lord removed.

First the crate was delivered before we got home from orientation and just our son and one of our daughters were there. The rain was pouring down, the truck couldn’t get up our driveway and even if it could have, there was not sufficient room in our garage to have built and packed the crate. The driver was patient and took the bundle to an empty trailer at one of the businesses in town he delivers to and let us keep it there for days until we found a place to build it.

The storage facility we called to see about renting a unit from was run by someone that had been in the funeral business in town and had known Don from years before (we didn’t know that until we made the call). He let us use part of the garage that cars are stored in so that a forklift could get in and out easily when it came time to load the crate and then he didn’t charge us the full rate for use of the space when I went to pay the bill.

Two friends in town (George and Marty) came with their pickup trucks and helped get the bundle to the storage garage and then helped Don and Ben put the crate together.

We had to rent a bander and forklift to come over to the storage facility. On the day the truck was scheduled to come (from out of the area), our window of time was 2:30 - 4:30 but the driver showed up around 1pm! We didn’t even have the crate fully loaded yet and here was the truck! The driver had other deliveries in other towns but said he would try to get back later on. We called the place with the forklift and they said if he didn’t get back by 4:30 they couldn’t send the equipment. That would have put us off another day and possibly more because we weren’t guaranteed a semi-truck the next day.

The guys who were going to band the crate were also the forklift operators and came over around 3:30 to get the banding started. Just as they were finishing off the banding, the driver called at 4:05 and said he was on his way and would try to make it by 4:30. The guys had to go get the forklift and within 20 minutes or so, the forklift was driving down into the storage facility with the semi-truck following behind.

And it wasn’t over yet. They really needed an extended fork to get the crate up and into the truck and didn’t know for sure if the fork they had (and a strap) would work. The Lord was gracious and the operator was very careful and in just a few minutes our crate was finally on the truck and on its way.

You know, we’ve been praying that God would be in the details and take care of things according to His timing, we just haven’t always paid attention that these are some of the very details that He was using to grow our faith.