Update From Pastor Gabe

Proverbs 25:25 and Good News From a Far Country

Greetings, friends. This is Pastor Gabe. Proverbs 25 .25 says, Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country. And I bring you good news that the Hughes family is doing fine. Praise the Lord.

He is good to us. I know we haven't been on the air for a little while. Suddenly the podcast episodes just dropped off last week with no explanation as to why. I was able to get the Sunday sermon uploaded yesterday and the Hear the Word of the Lord podcast is still going on, still being updated with Bible readings every day.

I think I'm in the book of Numbers right now, but I've not been able to record anything new. So this is an update for you to let you know what we've been up to, why there hasn't been a podcast since last week, and when I hope to resume the podcast again.

Now, if you follow me on social media, then you already know a little bit about what happened last week, but this is gonna be a broader story, not just what happened last week, but even what we as a family have been up to here in 2025.

So Becky and I have been homeschooling parents ever since we got married. Her daughter was two years old when we got married. This is our 15th year of marriage now. And I adopted Annie and she is my daughter.

The biological father has never been in the picture. So from the time we got married, we have been homeschooling parents. Annie was already receiving education, even at two and a half. It was always a bright two-year-old anyway.

She was able to read books on her own at the age of four. So yeah, she's always been very smart for her age. And then of course, four other kids come along. So we have five children and we've homeschooled them up until January of this year.

Well, really this started in the fall when we sent our oldest, Annie, to a Christian school. And that was partly because the homeschool network that we were a part of here really didn't have anything for her age.

There was a Christian school here in town that also did not have anything for her age because they didn't have upperclassmen grades yet. They didn't have juniors and seniors. They only went up through sophomore.

Because a lot of those high school kids want to be able to participate in sports. And because that Christian school wasn't large enough yet, they would leave that school and end up going to the public schools so that they could enter into extracurricular activities.

But that particular Christian school, we've started a relationship with, one that's here in Casa Grande, Arizona. And in fact, the building that we're hoping to build, our church, is looking at a building project and we could potentially be building on their land.

That deal's not done yet. We're still kind of in the talking phases of it because we haven't signed a contract agreement or anything like that. But that's the relationship we developed with the Christian school that's here in Casa Grande.

So Becky got to talking with people over there and they needed teachers. And she got pulled in. In the fall, she started as just like a TA as a teaching assistant. But then they had a teacher that had to leave abruptly and asked her if she would be willing to teach.

Now, this was something that we talked about her being able to do eventually, but we didn't think it was gonna be this soon. We still have a toddler. He's three years old and still potty training. We're still, haven't 100 got him.

Yeah, anyway, we're not totally done with that process yet. And so if she was gonna go back to teach, what were we gonna do with the three-year-old? Well, the schedule works out for us that I'm able to watch him during that time that she's teaching.

And then we trade off and she takes him and then I've got other things that I do during the day. But anyway, so it worked out for her to start teaching and for our children to begin going to that Christian school.

Now, we didn't think we would do that in the middle of a school year. We thought we would wait until the start of a school year, like the beginning of the 25, 26 school year or something like that. But it just worked out for us.

We talked with the school and they were okay with it. And so we ended up putting them into school in January. And Becky teaches there and I also teach there. I actually teach a Bible class to freshmen and sophomores four days a week, Monday through Thursday.

I don't get paid for that. I'm just doing that pro bono actually as a volunteer. Because again, with the kind of the teacher shifting that was going on, one person was moving into another position and it was gonna be easier for them if they didn't have to teach the Bible class.

And so I was told about it and I just threw my name out there and said, hey, I'd be willing to do it and I'd do it volunteer if you're needing somebody in a pinch. So that's been great. I've been doing that since this particular semester started.

So a little over a month now. It's been a wonderful time. The kids are adapting to school well. We have, like I said, our oldest attends a different Christian school because they don't have the upperclassmen grades at this school.

So I take her to school early in the morning at another school and then Becky and the kids go to this school here in Casa Grande. Okay, so anyway, that's kind of the picture of what we've been up to here in 25.

A Busier Family Schedule and Fewer Podcast Episodes

And for that reason, because we get up a lot earlier, our schedule has changed. By the time we get to the evening and we get the kids in bed, we're beat. And Becky has not had the energy to be able to do the podcast with me.

So that's part of the reason why, at least over the last six weeks or so, well, even going back to last semester because she was a TA in the fall, that's part of the reason why she's not been on with me as often for Friday because we're just busier.

Than we've been.

Kids are getting older and they're interested in being involved in more activities and things like that. So yeah, this has been, it's been exhausting, really. But hey, part of being a parent. Part of having kids and being involved in their lives and letting them do great and fun things.

And now even being parents that have children in school. So that's changed a lot of things as well. Anyway, this all plays into why there hasn't been a podcast since last week. On Wednesday morning, I left taking my oldest to her school and Becky and the kids left to go to their school.

A Sink Left Running and Water Pouring Through the House

And this is about seven o 'clock in the morning when we're all departing on Wednesday morning. And somebody left a sink on upstairs. Now I'm the first one back to the house because Becky and the kids stay over at their school.

So I get back to the house first. I've got a couple hours, which I use to do some lesson prep, make some phone calls if necessary, catch up on some emails, things like that. I kind of use that for some desk work for about two hours.

I got back to the house. This would have been maybe 8 .30. And when I arrived with my three-year-old, I got out of my pickup and I heard fire alarms going off. And immediately I thought it was our house.

I did not assume it was any of the other houses in our neighborhood. It's like my brain went right to, the fire alarms are going off in our house. Now I thought that it had to do with the oven because I had made breakfast that morning and there was at one point where I was leaving the kitchen to go get myself ready to leave.

And in the process of leaving the kitchen, I hit off on the oven to make sure that the oven was off. And when I pushed the button, it didn't turn off. And so I thought that was kind of odd, but I pushed it again and finally it shut off.

So I thought maybe there was some kind of a malfunction in the cancel button that didn't actually turn the oven off. And I thought maybe something inside the oven, it may have still been a pan in there or maybe the biscuits got left in there or something like that.

And now it was burning and filling the house with smoke. And that's the reason why the smoke detectors were going off. That was what was going on in my mind. I didn't smell smoke at all. So I didn't assume really that the house was on fire.

But when I got to the front door, I'm leaving my son kind of behind me. And I opened the door, the fire alarms are just ear piercing. But I don't smell any smoke. I can, however, smell water. And it was a really strong smell.

And I could hear the water dripping, pouring in the house. So I bring my son in with me. I don't think there's any fire danger. So I'm not really concerned in that sense. But I leave him right there in the foyer.

And I just tell him, buddy, stay right here. I'm gonna find out what's going on. Now, of course, the fire alarms are going off and they're ear splitting. They're just screaming fire alarms everywhere.

We have like eight alarms and they're all going off. And I go into where I hear the water pouring down. And it's right outside the downstairs bathroom and into my office. And the water is coming down through one of the smoke detectors.

And that set the smoke detector off. And they're all connected. So if one goes off, they're all going off. So that's what's happening. I know there's not a fire, but I can just hear the water dripping.

It's coming from upstairs somewhere. And so the first thing I do though is run into my office and I see the water pouring down on everything that I use to record. My laptop, my recorder, microphones, cables, everything is soaked.

It's just getting doused. Now, the amazing thing was, I had two very, very nice Bibles sitting just off to the right of that equipment. None of them, neither of those Bibles were touched. Very thankful for that.

I did, however, have another legacy Bible that was sitting there that did get soaked with water and an R .C. Sproul commentary that got hit as well. I lost a few books. I lost a lot of paperwork, lost some books.

And yeah, like I said, my electronics look like they're ruined because they're basically sitting there in a shower. So I grabbed the laptop and all of this is happening in a matter of like five seconds.

You know, I mean, even from walking in the door to getting in the office to grabbing the laptop and all this, maybe 10 to 15 seconds has transpired. All of this is going very, very quickly. So I grabbed the laptop off the desk.

I run into the dining room and I just set it on the dining room table. That side of the house is clear. There's no water over there on the side of the house that includes like the living room, dining room, kitchen.

I know it's pouring from upstairs. So I run up the stairs. I get to the children's bathroom. There's water all through the hallways. And there's no water in the master bedroom, but there's water in the hall that goes to every one of the kids' rooms.

And I run into the bathroom, which we have designated the kids' bathroom because that's right there where their bedrooms are. And there's a sink that is on full blast and the drain has been stopped up and water's just pouring out of it.

There's probably an inch or two of water on the floor. It's going down the hall and the water is looking for somewhere to go. So it's going into the vents and it's pouring out through the vents downstairs.

Well, there happens to be a vent right over my desk. And that's why all of my recording equipment was taking a bath because the water had gone into the vents. It was pouring down out of the vents and through one of the smoke detectors too, interestingly enough.

Anyway, but that was my present situation to shut the water off. And then the next thing to do was to shut the fire alarms off. Now, the fire alarms are scaring my three-year-old. So he's actually, unbeknownst to me, following me through the house.

So I get the sink shut off and I turn around and I see him there and I have to do something with him because I can't have him with me while I'm trying to run around shutting off all these smoke alarms.

So I take him into the master bedroom and just leave him there. And I just tell him, Bubs, I gotta have you stay in one spot. You just have to stay here. You're safe, everything's fine, but I gotta shut these alarms off.

And he tells me, okay. He ends up like crawling under our bed and hiding under the bed after that. But anyway, I went and grabbed the stepladder out of my daughter's room, which they used to, my two middle girls, they used that stepladder to climb up to the top bunk.

And so I took that stepladder and I went around pulling fire alarms down. I'm just like unscrewing them, pulling them down, taking the battery out. And that takes me a little while. That might take five minutes or something like that to get around to all of them and get them shut off.

Finally, I've got them shut off. I got the water shut off. I've got the fire alarm shut off. And I'm still hearing water just dripping everywhere because it's going downstairs. There's no sense in going and getting towels right now because there's so much water that the towels aren't gonna do anything.

I got the shop vac, but even that wasn't, there was so much water that it didn't even feel like the shop vac was accomplishing anything. And so the, yeah, this was what happened on Wednesday. And I didn't tell Becky about it.

I didn't call her because she was teaching at the time. So I'm like, she just needs to focus on that. That's what she needs to do is teach. I'll catch her up on that later. And so I called a friend of mine and I explained to him what happened.

Assessing the Damage and Cleaning Up the Flood

And I said, I need somebody who's a good inspector who can come and assess the damage and tell me how bad it is and what I'm gonna need to do to repair anything. And so praise God, I'm thankful that he came by and he actually gave me a very good report.

He said, really, it looks like the water went where it should have gone. And that was into your vents and out. It doesn't look like it's in the walls. It doesn't look like it's in the drywall. And so he said, unless you're seeing stuff bubbling down and drywall breaking through the ceiling and water pouring out, it doesn't look like there's any serious water damage.

I would just watch it for a few days, look to see if you see walls bubbling out or drywall kind of expanding or something like that and then let me know. But otherwise, looks like it went where it should have gone.

All you need to do now is get some fans and get this water soaked up and the carpets dried out. So that's what we ended up doing. Becky used both the shop vac and the combination of the shop vac and the carpet cleaner to kind of get some of that stuff done up.

We used towels. I went and got a bunch of fans. So we haven't had box fans, I don't know in how long. I know we didn't have them at our previous house. So I just bought several of those 12 or $15 box fans and had them blowing on the carpet to get everything dried out.

The computer was a loss. Well, I actually just tried it a few minutes ago and it does turn on, but the speakers don't work. And I'm not sure what else, what other kind of damage would be in there. This recorder that I'm using also got wet and I don't know how this recording is gonna come out, but we're gonna find out.

As far as damage to the house goes, praise the Lord, doesn't look like it's that bad. I was prepared for, you know, I was probably gonna have to do two to $3 ,000 worth of repairs or something like that.

But that doesn't seem to be the case. Our greatest loss is in the stuff that I use to record podcasts and things like that. So I am in the project, the church, praise the Lord, the church brought me a new laptop.

And so I have a new laptop, was even able to finish up my sermon for Sunday. I did not lose any files at all. I had everything backed up to a cloud. So praise God, didn't lose any of that material, even what video stuff and things like that, I had all of that backed up.

Every podcast I've ever recorded backed up to the cloud. So I didn't lose anything there and was able to get a new laptop so that I can, you know, resume different things. One problem is that I don't know where my external drives are that have all my software on them.

So the software program that I use, the editing program I use to do the podcast and everything else, I need to find that. I have not needed those external drives since we moved, but now I actually need them.

So I need to dig through whatever box those external drives might happen to be in so that I can get the software reinstalled on my laptop to be able to do videos and the podcast and everything else. Several pieces of software that I use to do that.

Family Meeting, Repentance, and Prioritizing Devotions

But anyway, so that night, we had a time together as a family. When the kids got home from school, you know, they're running around all over the place.

I've heard about the flood.

They wanted to see how bad everything was. Then they're complaining that their socks are wet because they've been walking on the wet carpet. But that night we gathered around the table. I just got pizza because of course, you know, it's been such a crazy day.

Neither Becky or I had time to cook anything. So I just grabbed some pizza and we're sitting around the table and we're eating pizza that night and had a family meeting. And I said to the kids, listen, I'm not mad.

By the way, we never found out exactly who it was that left the sink running. This is not an unusual problem because I think all the kids have done this at some point, just left a sink running. This just happened to be one of those times where they left it on full blast and the drain was clogged.

And so it just poured out of the sink and all over the place. The kids had told me that the drain was really, really slow. They told me that several days ago, that the water in their sink was not draining quickly.

And I didn't do anything about it. I just kind of let it be like, oh yeah, I'll get to it eventually. And so I contributed to the problem as well. So there was no reason for me to get mad at them and go into detective mode and try to figure out which of them had done this.

Whichever kid it was, we have a kind of an idea, but still, it doesn't really matter now at this point. I told them that I'm not mad. This was an accident. And even though I lost a laptop, I didn't lose any files.

That's a bigger deal to me than losing the equipment itself. And so I said, this is just one of those things that happens, so daddy's not mad. However, it did make me aware of some things. And during the time that I was driving from the house back over to the school, I took that time to pray and ask God, okay, this has happened for a reason.

So what do I need to see in the midst of this? What are you doing here in this to get my attention, to get me to see something? And there's a lot of little things that we're missing. And one of those things that we're missing, this isn't really a little thing, but it's just one of those things we've just kind of pushed off to the side and we're not doing it as frequently or as regularly as we used to.

We're not doing family devotions right now. It's like we've gotten so busy with everything else that we're not as regularly doing our devotionals as we used to. It was a lot easier when it was homeschool because we just kind of fit it in as even part of our homeschool day, as part of the curriculum.

Now we're on a new schedule and we're not even taking the time to read the Bible and pray or sing a song together. And so as I'm recognizing that we're missing all these little things, there's just little stuff that we're not catching, like turning a sink off.

But it's made me aware of the biggest thing, and that's we as a family spending our time with the Lord. And so that was what we talked about. That was our family meeting on Wednesday night. And since then, it's still been a struggle to kind of schedule that in, but I'm recognizing the need for prioritizing that.

Because you overlook that, a drain gets clogged, something bigger is gonna happen and it's gonna make an even bigger mess. And so it is good for us to recognize and see that now. We had a small flood in our house that pointed to a bigger spiritual reality for us that we need to pay attention to and take care of.

And that has been our priority as a family now over the last several days. So that's why the podcast has not been on, because of that little minor flood that we had. Now I do need to replace some equipment.

Replacing Recording Equipment and Supporting the Ministry

Like I said, the church got me a laptop, so I have that. I have gotten a new recorder and there is a great listener and a good friend of our family who has already known about what happened and gave us the money to be able to pay for some of that immediate recording equipment.

Very, very thankful for that. I wanna create a backup system though. I'm recording this from the church right now, actually. And I wanna create a backup system in case something like this happens again.

I've got a place that I can get to in case of emergency and be able to pick up some recordings. So if you wanna contribute to that, help us out with equipment we lost and also with creating a smaller system, but something that at least would work temporarily as a backup in case something like this happens again.

And I've got somewhere I can go to be able to catch up on those recordings. Then you can donate to the ministry. If you go to the website, www .utt .com, click on the Give tab there at the top right of the page, that goes to the church.

So what you give through that tab goes to our church, which is non-profit, so it's tax deductible. But I also wanna give you that assurance that whatever you give, I will only use as far as I need it.

Like when I've got the equipment paid for and everything taken care of, I'm not gonna use any more money after that. It will go to the church and perhaps our building fund or whatever ministry that we're doing from that point on.

So you have my word that I won't use it on anything personally lavish or anything like that. It will only be used for helping to rebuild my recording equipment, my small little studio, having a redundant system so that I've got something that's a backup.

And then after that, everything else will go back into the church, back into the ministry. So you can give that way. You can also give via PayPal, which is whenweunderstandthetextatgmail .com. That's the email address that's attached to our PayPal account.

Whenweunderstandthetextatgmail .com, all of that together. Or there's Venmo. And for Becky and me, our Venmo is Gebekehues, G-E-B-E-K-E-H-U-G-E-H-E-S. And when you bring that up, it will have our pictures on it.

So you'll know that you're getting the right thing. You'll see Gabe and Becky, I think in our what shirts even. I think it's the avatar that comes up. So that's if you wanna help us out. You know, our listeners have been so incredibly wonderful.

And we've talked about how we would not have been able to even make it through last year if it was not for your generosity. So you've already done so very much for us. And I have never wanted to take advantage of that generosity.

I wanna be responsible with it and only do what you expect of us in the ministry that we do, whether it's in our family, in our church, or even through the podcasts and through the videos. And so if you trust me with that and you would like to be able to give or donate to that, then that's how you can give to the ministry.

Gratitude, Prayer, and Returning to Luke

I thank you again for listening. I've had some emails from a few folks asking where the podcast has been, text messages even, for those who have my phone number, or DMs on X or something like that. And it lets me know that people care.

Some of those messages have even come with concern, like did something happen or something like, well, yeah, something did happen. But praise God, we're all okay. There was no injuries or anything to that effect.

The house still smells, it smells like mildewy now. So we need to do something about the water. We discovered another carpet. It wasn't like the laid carpet. It was like a throw rug sort of a thing that was wet that we overlooked.

And Becky just discovered it last night. She's like, oh, this carpet's still soaking wet. Okay, great. So things like that. Anyway, we're thankful to God that he's always taking good care of us. We're still in good health, in good spirits, just recognizing there's some things we're overlooking and missing, and we need to make sure that we're keeping our priorities and our focus in the right places.

So thank you again for your prayers for us and your encouragement also. Like I said, I hope this recorder actually recorded this message, and I can get it uploaded to you so that you can hear a little bit about what's going on.

I hope you enjoyed my fun little adventure story there. And God willing, I'll be back on with the podcast with the next lesson in Luke this coming Wednesday. Thank you guys so much, and may the Lord bless you and your family as well.