Have you ever thought you had a plan of action all laid out, and then you got some new information that totally scrambled your whole idea? Well, that’s where I am right now. I just received a whole set of photos of the school project, in various stages, which gives me a lot of new ideas to share. The issue is that a lot of them are several months old, so if I want to really take you along for the journey, I will need to backtrack a bit.
I had mentioned earlier about some of the miraculous timing of events that God had set up, and I thought you might be interested in one of the first ones that happened. I have a lot of details about this one, since it involved me!
I think it was on a Wednesday evening, before we were even totally sure how this project was going to proceed, or what building were were going to use, that my wife asked me what had ever happened at a property auction that a friend was having. I replied that I didn’t know, but I would Google it and see what I could find. The first search result was the website for the auctioneer that had handled the sale. I saw a long list of auctions and was a bit dismayed to think that I would have to scroll through all of them to find the one I wanted.
The list happened to be upcoming auctions, and I scrolled down just far enough to see the first one. Wouldn’t you know, it was an online auction, ending in 4 days, for hundreds of desks and chairs, for students and teachers, from a local school system! That really got my mind working, and I looked at the whole sale. They were basically being sold by the room, and someone had put some very minimal bids on most of the rooms and lots. It was at this point that one of two things happened. Either I lost my mind, or I realized we should step out in faith and see what we could do. The jury is still out on what my original motivation was!
I called the school committee chairman and told him what I had found. He also got very interested and said he would inform the rest. For some reason, we had a church function either the same day or the next, because I took the opportunity to get some pledges from friends to help raise the amount the board had decided we could pay for each room. I left the bidding to others, because it wasn’t my job, and also because I have a habit of developing bidding fever when I decide I want something, and couldn’t guarantee something crazy wouldn’t happen.
Someone looked up the cost of new desks and chairs, and since they were very expensive, we weren’t sure how high these used ones would go, or really what they were worth. We had gone to the location and looked at them, and they were in good shape. I have seen school desks go fairly high in small groups, since there are a lot of people in our area interested in them, as well as resellers.
Comes the night of the action closing, and since I knew what our bidder name was, I could watch the lots close. I was on the edge of my chair every time one of the lots we had bid on got near to closing. It was here that I had to wonder if I had had too little faith. As I watched them close, I realized we were getting pretty much everything we had bid on, and for very good prices. In the end, we got over 250 desk and chair sets, as well as various other things like file cabinets, for only pennies each! We filled our school for the foreseeable future, and the total cost was what we had thought we may have to spend for each room that was auctioned!
Of course, since we had no building yet, the question of storage was the next big thing. We were able to borrow a semi trailer for a while, but as soon as we bought the building, we moved them there, and they are still in a couple big piles there, eagerly awaiting the day when the rooms are ready for them.
I don’t know how the rest of our people feel, but this was a definite sign to me that at least we were supposed to go ahead with our plan to start a school. Wasn’t sure yet where, but at least we had the furniture. And as far as I know, there has only been one more recent sale of school equipment since, and although we were interested in a few things, the bidding was so hot that we were not able to buy anything. I’m guessing God didn’t think we needed it! But what IS sure is that something like this can give you a boost of faith to keep going, and assurance that everything else will work out as it needs to.
If you would like to donate to our project, you can go on our website, www.uccs.school, there is a Donate button there, or you can contact us for more information.
