I wasn’t there, but I guess there was a lot of excitement at the church yesterday. When the first person arrived at the building, it was discovered that there was water leaking into the fellowship hall from above. The initial assessment resulted in a report that the sprinkler system had either gone off or was leaking. What had happened is that a pipe had frozen and burst. Assessing the location of the leak required some shuffling through attic space in the hallway adjacent to the fellowship hall. The leak was detected and the water supply to the offending pipe was turned off but not before a significant amount of water had fallen to the floor. Carpet in the hallway was wet and volunteers were summoned to help clean up the public areas at the church.

Even though it was Saturday, a day that is usually not filled with activities in the church building, there was a memorial service scheduled, so the volunteers had to scramble to get ready. Wet vacuums were brought in to extract water from carpets. Ceiling fixtures were drained of accumulated water. Floors were mopped. At some point someone realized that the kitchen would be unusable for the funeral because the water was shut off. Volunteers were dispatched to a nearby coffee shop to purchase coffee for the reception after the memorial service.

Here as in other places, food is an important part of our rituals of grief. Full funeral meals aren’t quite as common as they are in the midwest, but it is practically unthinkable that there might be no opportunity for people to have a hot beverage and a snack while they visited and consoled one another following the service. i’ve found that those times are precious. Wonderful stories of the recently deceased community member are told. A sense of common purpose around remembering the loved one emerges. Those closest to the departed one make progress in their journey of grief.

When I think back on funerals of people that I have loved, I don’t remember what was said in the eulogies or the pastoral prayers, but I do remember stories that were told in the reception after the service. That recollection is a bit humbling for me because I am a preacher. I’ve delivered a lot eulogies and funeral sermons. I’ve carefully crafted a lot of prayers for memorial services. I saw those tasks as a sacred mission of tending to those who are grieving. Even though I often delivered sermons without notes in regular worship, I always prepared a full manuscript for funerals. they are simply too important for there to be a misstep or a misspeak. Grieving families deserve the words that are said to be just right. However, it is possible that I placed too much emphasis on what I said. My ego sometimes got in the way of what is most important in serving grieving people. The truth is that the volunteers who baked the goodies and served the reception were as important to the process as the preacher.

Yesterday’s event at our church demonstrated the power of Christian service. Volunteers rallied to do what they could to minimize the damage at the church and to make it ready for grieving family members. Those attending the memorial service probably never realized how much the flow of their day was aided by unseen folks who were wiling to roll up their sleeves ad clean up gallons and gallons of water, to run vacuum on the carpets, mop floors, and even run for coffee to serve.

It was also another reminder for me that buildings around here are not set up for cold weather. Compared to the temperatures being endured in much of the rest of the country, It wasn’t all that cold. It got down into single digits above zero - definitely low enough to be a danger to those forced to be outside and definitely low enough to freeze water. But we saw lots of reports from familiar places of temperatures that were a lot colder. Our old home in South Dakota saw -25 cold. That was “warm” compared to most of our home state of Montana, were temperatures were -45 and colder in some places. At -40 metal becomes brittle. Skin exposed to those temperatures freezes within minutes. Frostbite is painful and causes loss of tissue. People die of exposure. Severe cold is no joke.

The places where we have previously lived, however, are set up for the cold. Buildings are designed with enough insulation to keep pipes from freezing. Underground pipes are buried below the frost line. In this country there are lots of people who have no idea about the frost line. Just a few days ago I was digging post holes at the farm with no problem. There was no frozen ground. Three days of temperatures well below freezing, however, have changed things. I’m sure the ground is frozen several inches deep now - deep enough to cause problems with water pipes that aren’t buried deep enough.

Our home is relatively new, but there is no insulation in the walls of our garage. I didn’t know that detail until the first really cold spell during the first winter of our living here when the water line to the outside faucet froze and burst a few feet from the spigot. Fortunately, I discovered the problem before things warmed enough for the water to flow and I could turn off the water to that spigot without having to turn off the water to the rest of the house. I also got lucky to have a plumbing company that could respond to the issue within a couple of hours. The pipe was repaired. I now have a system to drain that section of plumbing each autumn when we anticipate cold weather. I don’t need that outside faucet during the winter and I leave it drained until things warm in the spring so that there is no danger of freezing. I have also replaced the copper pipe feeing the spigot with pex pipe which is flexible enough to expand and can endure more pressure from freezing than copper.

We are not suffering. We are warm and safe and the major systems of our house function well. Although we do have a heat pump, we have a supplemental gas furnace that takes over when temperatures fall enough to make the heat pump inefficient. And I’m sure that there is a reasonable fix for the frozen pipe at the church. Fortunately, there were enough volunteers to respond and keep things going, even on a very cold day.