When Mold Gets You Down

"Mom, is it normal for my wooden race track to have hair on it?"

"What?"

"I pulled out my race track and it has hair on it.  Will you come look at it?"

"Sure."

I go downstairs to David's room to see what he's talking about and find this:

And yes, you are seeing right.  There really were little white bugs crawling in it.  Blah!

"Oh my goodness!  No!  That's not normal!"

I pulled out his dresser and found mold up the wall, on the carpet, on the bottom of his dresser.  I couldn't do anything about it because Joy's birthday party was starting in ten minutes, so I told him to stay out of his room, shut the door and walked away.  

Our poor, expensive, really sturdy dresser

After the party I spent an hour on the internet looking up the many different varieties of mold trying to identify what we were dealing with.  While I couldn't identify what mold it was, I was able to determine what it was not.  It definitely was not the bad black mold.  Wew!  

Regardless, I started feeling pretty down about it.  Now we needed to get my asthmatic, allergy-ridden child out of his basement bedroom and move him to the main floor office.  Awesome.  I know how much Hubby loves furniture moving projects especially when it involves moving all of the computers, the internet cables, the modem, etc.

We also had to deal with the mold.  Hubby called me from work to say hi and I told him what was going on. He talked to a coworker who knew about such things who told him what to do.  He came home from work and got busy.  He cut the affected carpet out, removed the carpet tack, removed the baseboard, cut out the bad drywall, emptied the dresser and flipped it upside down to dry out, and moved the dehumidifier into the room and shut the door.  We already have a good air purifier in the room so that was also running.  

Carpet, trim, and drywall removed

I had church that night and at first had a hard time getting into the worship.  All I could think about was my torn up basement, the mold that is in the walls (there is still some on the support beams behind the drywall), all that we are going to have to do to fix it.  Then I started thinking about my dishwasher that I tried to fix but is still not cleaning the dishes very well.  Which led to my thinking about my car with the leaking rear shocks so every bump in the road goes really bump, bump.  I was making myself depressed!

The mold on the support beams.  

Then I slapped myself upside the head and started to pray.  "You are the God of my mold problem. You are the God of my broken dishwasher.  You are the God of my broken car.  You are the God of the chipped paint on the walls of my house.  You are the God of the pile of laundry I have waiting for me at home."  And so on.  

I did one big problem dumping prayer and let it go so I could focus on God instead of my problems.  Nothing was solved while I was standing there praying.  My basement is still moldy, my dishwasher is still leaving my dishes crusty, my car is still bumping along, my walls are still full of nicks and dings, the laundry unfortunately did not wash itself while I was gone.  

But I felt better knowing that God is in control even though these areas in my life feel out of control.  I don't have to stress out over my problems.  I'm not walking through them alone.  God is right by my side the entire way.  

Next week you'll get to see the results of our bedroom/office swap.  I'm sure it will involve a whole lot of purging.  Yikes!