A Cello Praise!

It's been over a week, and I can't believe I didn't write about this already! God is so good!

A few weeks ago, right after Christmas, Charis got to go spend a week with her cousin Hannah Gross in Pella, IA. She had so much fun! She got to go sledding, pond ice skating, and just in general had a wonderful time.

She also brought her cello with her. She practiced "a couple of times," so I'm not sure it was worth the trip for the cello, but it was a good idea in theory...

Anyway, on the way home, we went to St. Louis to see Sarah Greenwood's wedding. That was a wonderful and beautiful wedding, and we got to see some wonderful friends from our St. Louis days.

We had the cello with us in the car, and, unfortunately, we forgot that it was in the car. When we checked into our hotel, we just left the cello in the car. It stayed in the car all night long - and it was a below-freezing night that weekend - probably in the teens or less.

When we got home, Charis noticed her cello had this funny sound to it, and the strings were too close to the fingerboard. We took it to the guy we purchased it from in Tulsa, and he looked at it and we talked about what happens when you leave a wood instrument in severe temperatures. When he turned the cello over, there was a crack going down the the back of the cello. He saw that and told us that the cello was pretty much "ruined" in its value. He could fix the crack for about $100 - but he would never buy it back from us and it had lost any resale value. We just purchased this full-size cello for Charis in August!

You can imagine our despair as we left his shop - leaving this expensive instrument to be repaired for $100 that seemed to be "totaled' in his words...

Charis just broke down in tears after that, and there was not much to say or do. We had all kind of failed to remember to take the cello out of the car.

About three hours later, I got a call from the guy at the shop saying that he had called the company that made the cello, and they were going to stand behind their instrument and replace the cello! The guy had another one just like it in his shop, and so we returned later that afternoon with a brand new cello for $100 for the set-up!! We were just so amazed and so thankful!

God had just shown us that He is with us all the time, and can step in and fix problems for us, even when we were ready to face the loss!

I think both Charis and I could not stop smiling all night after that!

So - just thought I needed to put this down in writing! Thank you, God!!!