It started out innocently enough. I needed to choose a site for our new house. After surveying the area, I chose a nice location to one side of our garden area. It was covered with tall bushes, so I could not see the lay of the land, but it looked pretty level, and I figured it would work. The best part about it was that it did not appear that there were any tall trees that might fall on it. In my mind, that was a major consideration! So, I sent the little girls out to clear the land so that we could level it. I wanted it to be all finished before Roy got back from America. If we all worked hard, surely we could get it done quickly and surprise him!

It really did not take long for the girls to clear it, so several days later, we gathered the hoes and buckets and went out to get that spot level. When I finally surveyed the cleared land, I was a bit surprised to find that it sloped up a lot more than I had imagined! In fact, it was on quite a hillside. But, since my girls had worked hard to clear it, we got started digging.

We dug, and dug and dug, and we had just barely made any dent at all in that hillside. I was getting a bit panicky, since I wanted it all finished before Roy got back, so we worked a little longer each day. But finally, I had to admit defeat. Roy was going to be back in a few days, and there was no way in the world we could get it finished. So, we made sure the rest of the property looked great instead.

Having Roy back helped our digging program a lot. He has far better methods of moving dirt than I ever thought of, so our hole in the hill got bigger much faster. Finally, one day, I figured that it was nearly done, so I pulled out my house plan and looked it over. Once again I found myself in hot water! What I had drawn would certainly not work when it was in the hole in the hill! If I were to even try to put a door in the back, we would run smack dab into a mountain. That would be rather embarrassing. So, I got out my drawing tools and went to work to redraw the house plan to fit the current conditions.

I fought and fought with my house plan for several days, trying to make it fit into the hole in the hill that we had already dug. But no matter how I tried, it just would not fit. Roy finally informed me that my house was way too small. We would need to dig out more hillside. Now my little project was starting to look like a very big project, and we had a lot more digging that would need to be done.

Fortunately, about that time Jason and Shoshana returned from Travis’ school, and so they pitched in and started helping us dig. Roy estimated that by the time we are finished, we may have moved around 14 dump truck loads of dirt out of that hillside by hand! In case you have not thought about it, that is a lot of dirt!

You might be wondering why in the world we need a new house. Well, in order to meet the government standards, we need to have a permanent building as our children’s home. So, it is a rather important project for our kids so that they can be legal. We will not be given a house number until the project is finished. The good news is that after all the work of digging out that hillside, I don’t think that anyone would think that our house is not permanent!

The good part about all this is that it is teaching us all a lot about how to work as a team.  In life we can find many mountains of impossibility. If we look at ourselves, we know that we cannot move the mountain. When we work together, and help one another, the mountain is moved, one shovel full at a time. What kinds of mountains do you have in your life?