Buckle up, this is quite a story....

For us, this has been various things over many years!

In our early days of running Whizz Kids at Spring Harvest, it would generally be the boiler breaking down in the week before we left. And one year the iron exploded in my hand (No burns - I dropped it very quickly!)

One of the more memorable pre Spring Harvest disasters was the basement we stored all our kit being flooded with waist high and very smelly sewage.
We lost most of our equipment that we needed for 600 five to seven year olds in 4 weeks time!

Then there was the time someone reversed in the back of our car two weeks before...

I'm sure many of us could swap stories - both the funny and the scary, but today was something else!

We have two events end to end - We're both running workshops at the Equip festival (One Way UK) in Rugby over the weekend, then driving North on Sunday afternoon ready for the FIEC leaders conference where Kay is doing a seminar, but also staying on to meet up with people who want to chat about disability related stuff in their churches. It's also been a busy two weeks having had two weeks of annual leave before hand.

Today started with what turned out to be a tiny blip in the day in comparison to what was to come. The editing pages of this and the resources website went down. "No sites could be found" is a terrifying notice to receive when you need the website to work.

I needed to upload all the workshop handouts and presentations to the site, password the page and create a QR code for it. Having found out it was a bug in the system I just put it down to a pre event irritation and got on with other things....there were plenty to choose from.

We stopped for lunch, all was well....and then it happened. A cabinet that had been attached to our wall for 27 years decided to part company with the wall. In it was all the posh glassware and the glassware we don't use very often. This included presents (wedding and Christmas), an engraved glass from when I joined Children worldwide, other special memory things and a couple of antique sherry glasses that belonged to my grandma.

The sound was both loud and terrifying.

The dining room looked like a bomb had hit it. Broken glass everywhere, added to by the heavy glass shelves and glass doors in the cabinet!

Steve did a magnificent job of clearing everything up, but we know we will keep finding glass for a while....which we're going to have to warn the house sitters about!
Just a few odd glasses survived, including one of grandma's sherry glasses!

Tomorrow I have to undo the packing of props and visual aids I'd done ready for the weekend, remove any hidden bits of glass and repack. But I'll be thankful, because yesterday I was packing that case right where the cabinet fell.

I'm safe.

Steve often stands in that space too - watching for things in the garden.

He's safe.

It was scary, it was sad, it was hard work for Steve - that he could have done without. It's also created some extra work for me tomorrow with having to unpack and repack.
But it's stuff.

It can be replaced.

And the work carries on.

Everytime I look at the now empty space on the wall I'm going to be thankful.
Although, next time we get a pre-event thing go wrong....I hope it's not quite so spectacular!

Whoever you know who does ministry - pray for them. They probably have things happen too - but just don't tell anyone.