When Nothing Goes to Plan
We had a plan. That is the funny part.
We live in a rural area and we are not careless people. We keep propane. We keep bottled water. We have a generator situation. When the power went out that Saturday morning in January, I genuinely thought it would be back on by supper.
It was not back on by supper. It was not back on for a week.
And one by one, every piece of the plan came apart.
The propane that would not connect
By the third night we were down to our last tank. We took it out, went to hook it up, and the threading on the bottle did not match the housing.
Sit with that for a second. Freezing house, dark house, the correct fuel sitting right there in front of us, and no way to get it where it needed to go.
I would love to tell you I responded with a beautiful prayer. What I actually did was stand in my kitchen and say, now what.
The water that was already frozen
The next morning the propane ran out, and at almost exactly the same time the water in the house stopped working.
Three dogs, one cat, two adults. No power, no heat, no way to cook, no way to bathe, no way to flush a toilet.
I remembered the case of bottled water we kept outside. I brought it in, set five bottles aside for us, and planned to use the rest to flush a toilet.
They were frozen solid. Of course they were. They had been sitting outside in an ice storm.
That was my five minute plan, and it lasted about five minutes.
What hope actually looked like
Here is the thing I want to be careful about, because I do not think hope is what a lot of people have been told it is.
Hope is not optimism. I was not optimistic. I did not believe things were about to get better, because there was no evidence for that. A lineman from Alabama told my husband they were putting in temporary poles and would not even guess at a timeline. It could be another two or three weeks.
Hope was smaller and more stubborn than optimism. Hope was the decision to keep going one more step while I still did not know how it ended.
So we packed. Three days of clothes, shoes, medication, dry goods, fruit, drinks, dog food, cat food, bowls, beds, toys. We drove an hour and a half to Amory with three dogs and a cat who refused to stay in her carrier because she wanted to be near her sisters.
We did not know how long we would be gone. We went anyway. That is hope.
The part I did not expect
When we arrived, the dogs jumped out and ran off their nerves and the cat immediately went under the car and would not come out.
Then Ron and his daughter and her boyfriend came out to welcome us. They had already been to the store and bought the things they knew we liked.
Later I got in the shower. Three days without heat or a bath, and that hot water felt like velvet on my skin. I did not want to turn it off.
It was somewhere in that shower that I realized the week had not actually broken us. It had just rearranged what I thought I needed.
What I would say to you
If you are in a stretch right now where every plan you had has come apart, I am not going to tell you to look on the bright side. That week was hard while it was happening, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.
But I will tell you this. You do not need to see the end of it to take the next step. You just need to take the next step.
Pack the car. Make the call. Ask for the help. Hope is not a feeling you wait for. It is something you do while you are still afraid.
Call to Action: God & Ice follows that whole week, plan by plan as each one fell apart, and the moments of provision that arrived instead. You can read the full story here.
