NaBloPoMo 2018 Day 5

So today's post will be a bit different than my usual posts.  We had a very stressful day yesterday and one that could have had a much worse outcome!  We had a fire at our church!  Let me back this up a drop - my husband is a pastor at a small church near where we live.  he was called to be the new pastor here and began on September 1st.

So, we had our regular service on Sunday morning and afterwards everyone went home or out for lunch.  One of our regular ladies was celebrating her birthday so a group of us (we her family plus John and I) went out for lunch together.  We had left the church and settled at the restaurant (quite close to the church - only a few blocks away) and had just placed our orders when John got a call.  He left the table and came back a couple minutes later and said to me "I have to go!" and he bolted out.  Now none of us knew what was going on but we did see several fire engines going past and hoped they had nothing to do with why John left.  A short while later he called me to let us know the church was on fire!  At this point we did not know the extent of it and only knew it was in the church library and was likely electrical. 

Long story short (probably too late already...) the fire was mostly contained to the library - which is a small room at the front of the sanctuary.  The fire was put out and there is (relatively) minimal damage.  They brought in a fire investigator and he spent quite a bit of time trying to determine the cause and he was unable to determine this.  He does not believe it was electrical, but so far he does not have a cause.

We are hugely grateful for many things:
- we are thankful the fire was contained to one small room
- we are thankful that no one was hurt
- we are thankful that the fire station is right across the street from us and that they were having an event there which resulted in the volunteer firefighters being at the fire station
- we are thankful that someone from the fire station noticed the smoke and was able to alert his team quickly
- we are thankful that a door was accidentally left unlocked and the man was able to get in easily to see where the fire was coming from and was able to suspect electrical which resulted in less water damage since they used foam to put the fire out
- we are thankful everyone was out of the building when this happened
- we are thankful this did not happen at night when the results could have been so much worse
- we are thankful that the two doors in the library were closed so that the fire was contained
- we are thankful for the fire departments that came out to save our church!

I hope I never have to experience anything like this ever again in my life!!

Here are a few pictures: