They Gave Everything and We Couldn’t Help

The house is old and without proper support. As are its owners. Mrs. Oakes is 71 years old. She moves slowly following a hip replacement but can only hold her cane with one hand because the other arm is broken. Mr. Oakes is closer to 80 and walks independently, but he is difficult to understand following a stroke. He also lost an arm in a coal mining accident earlier in life. As would be expected, the two were full of stories. He served in the army during both WWII and the Korean War. She lost a brother in Pearl Harbor. Of her ten siblings, only five are still living.

It was clear that at some point in history the Oakes' home had been added on to. During such renovations, the vital supports from the original house had been removed. The house now teetered precariously between a mountainside and a river at any moment ready to succumb to nature’s calling.

The bathroom floor was sinking. The roof was sagging, leaking and had caved in at some points. The furnace hadn’t worked since December.

The list of needs went on and on.

We were able to replace a ply-wood basement window and frame. Make the ramp less slippery. And re-cover a portion of the roof.

While we were working on menial projects Mrs. Oakes came outside and offered our team Pepsi. Six accepted her request and she quickly gave out the five in her hand before disappearing back into the kitchen to find one more.

Team member Joshua followed and watched her dig through the fridge, rummaging to no avail for that final Pepsi. She looked up with tears in her eyes and apologized. She was sure she had one more but she couldn’t find it.

Joshua cried too. Not because he didn’t have a Pepsi but because of how she gave everything she had—literally—and he could not fix everything in her home.

He didn’t sleep that night. Neither did Karen. They were too busy mentally walking through the Oakes’ home and re-examining every detail of every problem searching, hoping and praying for solutions.

They felt like failures.

Here was an elderly couple in desperate need of help giving everything they had and we had no choice but to leave them in a home dangerous to their already-unstable health.

In the middle of the night the Lord brought to Karen’s mind an Adventures' blog she’d seen a few months ago with an image of someone underneath a floor installing insulation. She’d asked God not to have her crawl under a floor.

But in the middle of the night she changed her request. She said, “Lord, I’ll crawl under the floor if it means fixing that bathroom.”

“You could fix that drain,” He said.

The tub and sink were both draining into the basement/cellar of the house creating a pool of water underneath the sinking bathroom. She could run the pipes outside of the house so they drained elsewhere. It wouldn’t be a permanent solution but would be a step in the right direction.

He also told her how to fix the support system underneath the bathroom. Again, not a permanent solution but a temporary one that likely would outlast both Mr. and Mrs. Oakes.

The following day we returned to the Oakes’ home.

We finished up the roof. We rerouted the plumbing. We reinforced the supports. We picked up trash in the yard. And we replenished their Pepsi supply.