Trials are Blessings in Disguise

I decided I'd better break this into several posts or it would be too long.  Unfortunately, that also means it will be out of order if you read top to bottom.  So consider yourself forewarned that if you want a resemblance of order, scroll down and read the posts from the bottom ones first. Anyway,..

As I sat in our car watching the fire and dawn approaching, I said a very simple prayer; "Heavenly Father, please grant us all the small miracles and big ones, if there be any that we need; and please help us to recognize them and see thy hand in our lives."  I knew he could make good come of it.  I'd heard others testify of the Lord's hand in their lives during adversity and had no reason to doubt that we would also say at the end of it, "We are better off for having been through it."  A quiet peace filled my heart and I expressed my faith to my husband to my Heavenly Father that I knew good come from this and we would see many miracles and help along the way.  I didn't know how long the ordeal would last and what we'd have to go through to get through it; but I knew we would need help and I knew it would be there.  I also knew there would be the temptation to get down or focus on our problems too much to see the blessings and help, so I prayed to recognize His hand in our lives as the miracles came.

From where we sat in the car that morning, the fire did not look like it had been that bad.  It looked liked we could clean up and move on with a repaired office in just a few months.  The fire marshal, our friend, and the news were all saying it was a total loss though.  Once it was light enough out, I ventured out despite the news crews to get a better view.  I prayed they would leave me alone, and they did.  It turned out the only intact piece of the building was the corner we had been looking at. Everywhere else, there were large portions of roof and walls missing.  It was a total loss.

The first big miracle we would need became apparent when I called the insurance company to notify them.  As I gathered things for the day, I called and reported the fire.  That's when I learned that we had the wrong kind of insurance.  When we purchased the building, it was for our home, so we had a residential policy.  Later, Richard moved his office into the front of our home.  The office grew and so did our family.  Eventually, the office crowded us out.  I remembered talking to the insurance company and telling them about the business and answering questions about how many staff, did he have worker's comp insurance, value of office furnishings and equipment, etc.  I thought I had switched our policy to a commercial policy when we moved out.  They had no record of it.  We needed a big miracle that our residential policy would somehow cover our losses!   Before they would discuss our policy and coverage options, however, we would have to be ruled out as suspects.

Our office building was built in 1894.  When we moved in, it had the original "carriage house," not a garage.  It was condemned, but we had a carriage house for a short while. :) We assumed at first that it had been faulty wiring that had sparked the fire from old electrical wires because the building was so old.  We had never had any electrical problems in the years we had owned it though.  It was quickly determined by the investigators though that the fire had been intentionally set. It had started in multiple places, both upstairs and downstairs.  And there had been a very strange fire the day before.  Thursday morning, our accountant came in to work to find a fire on top of her metal filing cabinet.  It was small and mostly just burning a few papers that were in a file organizer on top of her cabinet.  They cleaned it up, and went on with their day as best as they could, although quite shook up and baffled.  There were no electrical wires or anything that could explain the cause of the fire. That fire together with it burning down that night, and started in multiple locations, point to arson.

The day was filled with planning and answering questions for the fire marshall, the detective, the insurance investigator, etc.  Having an insurance policy, automatically made Richard and I the number one suspects, especially him.  Richard had had a foot surgery in July.  The doctor had expected him to be back to work full time within 4-6 weeks.  Others that had had similar surgery also said they'd been back to work after a month. Richard was not recovering as expected though and still spent most of his days in bed most of the time.  He had just started covering a few court appointments the week before the fire.  Every time he tried to get up and about, it would wear him out for a few days after.  He was rolling around using a knee scooter and had his right foot in a cast from the knee down.  It was obviously very hard for him to get around.  That was the day he'd planned to try to return to work for a half day and to start getting back into the swing of things.  He was pretty worn out though from having been to court the day before though, but was just going to bite the bullet and get on with life.  They questioned him on his whereabouts the day before during the first fire.  It just happened to be at the precise time he was in court making arguments before the judge.  The detective asked if anyone could verify it.  (Only the judge and a dozen attorneys also waiting to make their arguments - could you ask for a better alibi than a court record?)  They questioned the staff who all testified that he had not been in the office more than a couple times for a few minutes to pick up or drop off work in the past few weeks.  They asked when was the last time he had been upstairs and were surprised when he could give an exact date, "not since July 24th."  He had not been upstairs since before the surgery in July.  So the trial of not being able to recover from his surgery, turned into a miracle for us.  They could pretty easily clear him of being a suspect.

Another miracle:  Richard somehow put in a 12 hour day that day at the office!  The day before, being out 2 hours for court had put him back in bed for the rest of the day and was making it debatable if he'd fulfill his goal of going to back to work in the office for a few hours that Friday. I was leaning toward recommending he wait until Monday.

My husband's knowledge of technology (one of his idiosyncrasies - he's a lawyer that understands technology) was also a great blessing to us at this time.  He had the boys starting to "help" him build computers from preschool age.  We set up a phone to use.  With his, a fellow attorney's, and a spare laptop and spare wires and parts he had on hand he set up a mobile hot spot so they could begin checking and clearing their calendars.  Once our boys were out of school, they joined Richard at the office and they all worked to network all our spare laptops and computers to create a new office.  They spent all day Saturday helping too.  There were set-backs and mistakes, but by Monday morning the office was ready to run.  Every employee had a computer to work at and a couple of phones were ready to be used to make calls to notify clients.  By the end of Monday, everyone they needed to contact had been called and mailed the information of the fire and relocation.  A huge accomplishment and miracle. Another attorney that Richard talked to that had been through a fire, said it had taken them months to notify everyone and longer before they had an office open.  Technically, Richard didn't really even miss a day of work.  They were taking calls and operable in a very limited capacity by noon the day of the fire.

 Another evidence that the Lord was prepared for this came from an attorney Richard had hired.  Richard had originally only scanned in major documents for keeping in digital format.  This attorney pushed to change that practice to that they scan everything.  Richard and his staff worried a lot about how much work and information had been lost and would need to be redone, re-requested, etc.  Once he got access to his files though, we had another miracle!  They had backed up automatically the night before, just hours before the fire.   There was very little work that would need to be done to replace lost documents.  Mostly it would just be an effort on the staff to reprint some things.  The Lord had already put everything in place to minimize the damage to us by someone else's bad actions.

They operated out of the temporary office for a few weeks.  Another friend notified us he was leaving his office he had been leasing to relocate to a building he had purchased.  They were able to get into his old office under very favorable terms for our circumstances.  Employees worked not knowing if payday would be delayed, everyone served and helped that could.