Divine Protection

This is not a sign you want to see outside your house if you live in England. “Apologies for any inconvenience caused by these essential works. Emergency telephone....” You see, this sign means there is a gas leak somewhere leading up to your home. In fact, it might even be in your home.

About 9.30pm last night, as we sat watching television, someone banged on the door. (They didn’t ring the doorbell, they hammered.) We opened it to find a chap from the gas board, who identified himself and said, “Can you smell gas?” Of course the obvious answer to this is “no” as anyone in their right mind who smelled gas would already have called the gas board. Certainly we had not. Our neighbour, on the other hand, could smell gas by his front door. So this chap asked permission to come on to our property to check all was well.

And it seemed it was. Every check he ran outside our home - and even into the foundations - was clear. So he and two other fellows spent a couple hours in the rain boring small exploratory holes between our house and our neighbour’s house to try to find where the gas was coming from. And by about 11pm it was determined it was coming from right in front of our gate.

This perplexed us as we had definitely NOT smelled gas at all, but the readings were conclusive and immediately the barriers went up and the pneumatic drills set in.

I was not impressed. It had been a pretty fraught weekend. Although my husband was with me, he had been working for most of it. We had not had a proper evening since Thursday and suddenly Sunday was ruined too. I have to confess, I lost it. I even cried.

Luckily they managed to make everything safe by about midnight, although my husband and I can tell you from experience knowing that you have a gas main outside that has only been “made safe” (ie. not “repaired”) is not conducive to a good night’s sleep.

Luckily they came back in the morning and fixed it properly, leaving the hole open so any remaining gas can escape. We were without heat for a few hours, but it was no huge hardship considering the alternative.

Which leads me to a huge coincidence. Now I am not the best housewife in the world and my house is certainly not a shrine to tidiness. But one thing I am pedantic about is my bathrooms and kitchen These are always clean and sanitised. I am obsessive about it. One thing that has always bothered me is how our guest bathroom by the front door smelled. Despite me putting bleach down the drains and cleaning the sink and toilet daily, after a few hours the smell would return. It reminded us so much of our cats’ litter box from days of old that my son used to joke our cat boys had come back to haunt us. I was mortified and had various plumbers and contractors check it out, but no root cause was ever found.

This afternoon my husband noticed that the toilet no longer smelled. I noticed it too. I hadn’t even got round to my daily cleaning routine in there, and yet there was no odour. It still has not returned.

If you drew a line from where the fracture in the gas pipe was to our house, it would come to just about where the drain for the sink is in the guest bathroom. It appears that the smell we thought was the drains was most likely gas seeping into the house through the drains. It didn’t smell anything like gas, but it was gas. Ever since we moved in this house, a faulty connection between the mains pipes and the gas pipes leading up to our home meant that we had small amounts of gas coming into the house through the guest bathroom. And yet despite this, nothing bad ever happened. Imagine what could have - particularly if I was not so firm about forbidding anyone to smoke in the house.

Every day for the last two years plus God has been protecting my family and my house, even though I had no idea of the danger inside it. I cannot begin to describe how grateful I am.

“The Lord will keep you from all harm - he will watch over your life”
Psalm 121:7

“No harm will befall you; no disaster will come near your tent.”
Psalm 91:10