Funny Picture, Scary Story

It has been extremely cold lately which is no surprise to anyone reading this, but unfortunately during this cold spell we began having issues with our heat. Well, at least that's what we thought...

Wednesday a week ago at about 9:00 p.m. Ben and I were watching t.v. and I smelled this weird odor that reminded me of burning plastic. I immediately thought that the kids' small space heater had caught on fire. I ran into the back of the house, but only to find that everything back there was fine, but the smell was getting stronger. At this point Ben thought it smelled like burning wood, so we decided to turn off our heat just in case something was burning up in the unit.

We slept without heat that night and used our space heaters. We just moved the kids into the same room, so we were able to run two heaters in our bedrooms and we stayed fairly warm that night. The next morning it was 54 degrees in the rest of our house, so we spent the morning wrapped up in jackets, sitting on the couch, watching t.v. A man came to check on the unit and he discovered that we would need a new fan motor and filter for the unit. No problem! Done, he fixed it and we were back in business and in no time it was up in the high 60's in our house.

So, on Saturday night the same thing happened again. We smelled the exact same odor, and once again had to turn our heat off until we could figure out what the problem was. We got up Sunday morning and went to church. We tried to turn our heat on that morning, but the odor was still strong. Right after we got home another man came, and he could not find anything at all wrong with the unit. He said to turn it back on and if we smelled the odor again he could come back.

In the midst of our heat going out we were also having problems with outlets in the house going out. On Monday morning an electrician came to check on the problem with the oulets. He fixed the outlet in the kids' room, and then he checked out some others in the house. This is the part where the story gets to be a bit scary...

I was in the kitchen doing dishes when I hear the electrician say "Oh, well, this is your problem." I go into the front bedroom (TW's old room, soon to be nursery), and I see something that literally makes me sick to my stomach. An outlet in that room had been burning, and it was black on the outside. The wires inside were charred, and the electrician said that if we would have had something plugged into that outlet more than likely we would have had a fire. There is basically no explanation for why our house did not burn down. I know that it was God's grace and protection for our family.

I was overwhelmed with emotion and thankfulness. So, it turns out that there was never anything wrong with our heat. Thankfully, it works better now as a result of the improvements made, but the smell was the outlet burning and that odor was being pushed through the return and out all of the vents in the house. We never checked the outlets, because we just assumed that it was the heat the whole time. The outlet in the nursery was replaced, and we have to continue to trust the Lord with our anxieties and fears as we are now aware that this could happen again. We know what to look for and we definitely know the odor.

Well, we are now warm and are much more aware of checking outlets and making sure that we are careful about what we plug in and where...

This whole situation has been really stressful, but it has also been a reminder of how our God really does protect us, and how near He is to us!