Peace in the Unexpected

I thought I knew what my September blog was going to be about. It was supposed to be a l testimony of survival.

Every year, September feels like a marathon in my home because there are birthdays stacked on birthdays. This month I pulled off a last-minute pizza lunch for my seven-year-old. I planned a play gym birthday party for my two-year-old. Then came the big one: my husband’s 40th birthday. Harlem Nights.

And after weeks of celebrating everybody else, Superman encouraged me to go do something fun. So I grabbed some girls and celebrated with a little “girl meets golf” birthday adventure at Topgolf. It was last-minute, girly, fun, and honestly exactly what I needed.

I had made it through everybody’s birthdays and even celebrated another year of my own life. And I thought, “Okay, that’s September. I made it!”

Except… September wasn’t finished with me yet.

Sunday, September 27th, I woke up around 4:30am to use the bathroom. I turned on the hot water, and nothing happened.

I turned on the cold water, washed my hands, got back in bed, and mentioned it to Superman. He said it was probably nothing so we went back to sleep.

A couple of hours later, Superman got up to get ready for our first service at church. He noticed the hot water still wasn’t working, so he went outside to check the water heater.

And then he came back into the bedroom and calmly said, “Babe, I need you to get up. The house is flooding.”

A few weeks earlier, on September 10th, we had repaired a part on our water heater that had been leaking. But sometime overnight, that part burst.

Water had been spewing out of the water heater while my family slept.

It eventually filled the garage and started making its way into our home. By the time we realized what was happening, a third of our house had been impacted.

And suddenly, the blog I thought I was going to write didn’t feel so important.

Superman handled turning off the main water source and contacted JEA. I reached out to the company who had previously repaired the water heater. When I learned they didn’t offer emergency service, I called an emergency plumber.

We didn’t have a meeting. We didn’t stand in the middle of the flooded house and assign responsibilities. We just moved and communicated as we went.

And somewhere between moving things, making phone calls, documenting damage, removing water, and waiting for help to arrive, I realized something.

This was the part of September I didn’t plan for, but life also includes the moments we wish we could edit out.

The leak.

The flooded floor.

The inconvenience.

The unexpected expense.

The disruption.

And what has struck me most isn’t that our house flooded. It’s that our peace didn’t have to flood with it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s stressful. A third of our living space is inaccessible. There are at least 20 fans and three dehumidifiers drying and retracting water at once to prevent mold and mildew. Things to clean up. Things to repair and replace. Things to figure out. And the insurance processes and logistical and financial questions that come with something like this.

But even in the middle of all of this, I went to bed Sunday night grateful. Grateful that when Superman woke me up, he wasn’t panicking. Grateful that we didn’t have to figure out who was responsible for what. Grateful that after nearly 24 years together, we have learned how to move through hard things together without needing a strategy session first. We just know.

And maybe that’s one of the quieter gifts of marriage that nobody talks about enough.

Sometimes love looks like romance and date nights and birthday celebrations. And sometimes it looks like standing barefoot in a wet house at seven in the morning, trying to figure out where the water is coming from.

While I don’t believe every unexpected thing that happens is a lesson from God, I do believe God can meet us in unexpected things.

And Sunday, in the middle of a flooded house, I found myself noticing something I might have missed if everything had gone according to plan.

I am grateful for the person I get to navigate life with.

I thought September was ending with a birthday. Instead, it ended with a reminder.

We don’t get to decide how every month ends. We don’t get to control every inconvenience. We don’t always get the luxury of finishing one chapter before another chapter begins.

Sometimes the water starts coming in while you’re sleeping. Sometimes the plan changes before you’ve had time to adjust. Sometimes you are forced to slow down, not because you planned to, but because life made you.

And when that happens, I hope we remember that peace isn’t the absence of problems. Sometimes peace is realizing that even when the house is a mess, the plan has changed, the unexpected happens, and you don’t know exactly what happens next… you are not navigating it alone.