We moved into our home, a lovely “fixer-upper”, Labor Day weekend 21 years
ago. We moved from a brand new home in Clear Lake that we built where
everything was fresh and shiny and clean. It was great! We had a nice
neighborhood for our then two little boys and nice neighbors but for whatever
reason I would periodically pick up that Real Estate book in the grocery store and
look through it. We had talked about having a place with a “land”, a nicer view
than the neighbor’s brick wall out the window. Living in suburbia you don’t
typically find “land”. Well, I came across an ad with pictures of a log cabin looking
house with an acre on the creek and we decided to track it down. I’ll never forget
the first time we drove through the neighborhood, the oaks trees arching over the
road toward as we drove toward the creek. It was beautiful. The house itself was
stuck in the 70s, with shag carpet and avocado countertops and linoleum. We
looked at the house three times before I agreed it was the right place to buy.
Stew, the dreamer, knew right away. He said, “We can fix it up. It will be our
dream house!”
Fast forward one more child (SARS), and 18 years… well it was indeed a fixerupper. We (and when I say ‘we’ I mean Stew) hammered and sawed and scraped
and taped and floated and painted too many projects to count. He swears at one
point the house was complete but I don’t remember it that way, probably
because we always had one project or another going. We talked about the grand
things we wanted to do to make it our dream house but time and money and
kids’ busy lives kept us from ever making huge drastic changes to the house. We
did move and rearrange the staircase several times which is pretty huge and
drastic but that was as major as it got. But then in September of 2008, we met
Ike.
Perhaps you’ve heard of or even met Ike yourself. He’s in the de-construction
business. He helped us break through to finally building the home we always
wanted. I do not recommend this method of remodeling. All kidding aside,
Hurricane Ike brought about 2 feet of surge water into the downstairs of our
home. We moved what we could up and out of the way but having made up our
minds over the years to always evacuate (mandatory evacuation mandates help
with that decision), we headed for Kansas to visit with our oldest son while the
storm moved through. (Fleeing a hurricane we ran into a tornado but that’s a
story for another day). We came home a week later to significant damage to our
home and belongings and our yard. Two feet of surge water means we basically
lost the downstairs of our home. Surge water is nasty smelly stuff, contaminated
with all the yucky coodies you imagine it is.
This is however where the blessings set in. That’s not to say there wasn’t a sense
of shock and loss but we were almost immediately surrounded by God’s love and
provision through friends and strangers that it was almost impossible to be put
out, unnerved, angered by our circumstances. It is very humbling I will say to
throw open the doors of your mess and let people come in and muck and shovel
and begin to clean it out. (Matt, I’m sure there’s another sermon in there
somewhere). There was stuff that had been sitting in surge water for a week that
I’m sure was beyond gross but people showed up day after day and did just that.
One day we had so many people at the house helping that our neighbors got
upset about all the cars and traffic.
One of the nicest things that have ever been said to us was in the midst of the
chaos after the storm. It was that day so many people were there to help. A
group provided lunch which seemed to multiply just like the loaves and fishes.
We were gathered up to pray before we ate and one of the pastor’s took a
moment and looked around at all the volunteers, then he looked at Stew and me
and said, “You know, Stew and Mel, the fact that all these people are here is
much more of a testament about the two of you and your family and how you’ve
poured into the lives of others over the years than it is about us. You’ve loved
others well. That’s why we are here.” That’s the moment I lost it actually.
So really it’s just a testament to where our treasure is, to where our hearts are:
It’s in the community of friends, new and old, centered on a shared faith and trust
and service to a loving God. It’s a community that offered us a home to stay in for
weeks while ours was difficult to live in. It’s a community that invited us for
months to share meals in their homes because we didn’t have a kitchen. It’s a
community that continued to show up for weeks with chainsaws and muscle to
clear out the yard of felled trees and debris.
It was in the middle of all this that Stew, the dreamer, began to have a vision for
our new home and what it would look like, and we began to talk about how we
had been so blessed by our hurricane that we needed to bless and share with
others with what would turn out to finally be our dream house. We didn’t know
what that would look like when we were first talking but God started putting
people in our path that we were in a unique position to help. We went from living
in just a few rooms of our damaged home to having more room than we could
use when our new home was complete.
The Cooper Compound was begun! First Matt Davis, then Hudson and Robin by
association, then Shannon, our teenage friend from the 3rd ward with no place to
go all moved in about the same time. Now Rachel is with us and our son Chris will
move home next week for a time. That’s eight of us. Oh, and Alex and Ronnie
occasionally sleep on the couch or in the loft. I love that they feel at home
enough to do that. You never know who you’re going to find in the mornings.
Shannon stayed for awhile but moved on. That was a difficult time and also a
story for another day. It led us to say ‘no’ on a couple of occasions when people
asked if we had room for one more. All of these Compounders will move on
eventually but we’ve come to think of our home in these terms: I wonder who
God is going to put in our path next.