Warm and toasty...

So I've been away at a conference this week, and while some amazing things happened for me and some of my family, once again I managed to embarrass us.

As some of my friends know, I seem to have a thing with fire alarms. I thought it was just restricted to Whangarei, but now I know for sure that I carry an anointing in this area.

On the first night of the conference we came back to our motel and started warming up some soup and making some toast. I popped two slices of bread in the toaster and didn't think anything of it. It wasn't long before I could smell burning toast and when I popped the toast up, sure enough, black charcoal was there to meet my gaze.

I noticed the dial on the toaster was set to it's maximum heat - I was not impressed! Then the familiar beeping of the room's smoke detector began. "Oh no!" I did my usual routine of running around like a mad woman and began opening doors and windows. Kate was already fanning the alarm with a tea-towel, my mum soon joined suit and I jumped up on a chair to join the fanning parade.

I'm sure God was having a little chuckle to Himself...

"Turn it off!" my mum said, so like a good step-daughter, that's exactly what I did. I reached up and twisted the alarm and (sigh) the beeping stopped. 3 seconds passed and then the worst thing EVER happened!

We were greeted with the deafening sound of the building's main fire alarm going off!!!

"Quick, switch it back on!" my mum said, but alas, my efforts to restore all sanity to the motel was in vain. And so we joined the whole building and evacuated to the carpark (keep in mind that this all happened around the hour of 11pm, so there were certain individuals standing outside in their pj's! Some pj's being scarier than others).

Kate owned up on behalf of us to the motel's manager who was running around trying to find the cause of the fire, and we all went back to our rooms. I must say that all the residents were quite forgiving - most of them being delegates from the same conference. God bless forgiving Christians.

My spiritual lesson which I think is quite fitting (and I'm sure Symon will agree with me on this) is that you have no idea how much you can influence others round you. Just like burnt toast can cause 30 people to leave a building, so can one life on fire cause those around you to leave their place of comfort.

"The Kingdom of God in you, is greater than the kingdom around you" ~ Bill Johnson