I bought a new home in 2007. The design of my new home was perfect for my family. The upstairs held the game room, media room, bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms.

My children were 11,13 and 15 years old and they needed more space than my three bedroom 1700 square foot house could give them. My new house had twice the square footage as my old house. In addition to this, the neighborhood had a pool complex and I love to swim. To swim in a Olympic size lap pool daily was a dream come true. I felt as if I had moved into paradise.

However, with any new house there are always surprises and in Texas the surprises come quite frequently. The most frequent surprise is cracks in the structure. This is not due to the builder as much as it is due to the soil consistency. I called my construction company within the first two years to complain about the cracks and they said there was no foundation issues after a survey had been completed.

The next few years I had my nightmare in family courts with my ex-husband and his third wife. During that time in my life I did good to keep my sanity. I couldn’t worry about my house. That didn’t stop the problem though.  The cracks slyly kept sneaking into my walls and then the ceiling on top of my stairs started to peel away.

Last year I filed another complaint and they sent a structural engineering firm out. They once again said there was no problem but the cracks kept propagating so this year I filed another complaint. They once again sent out the same firm to check my cracks. Same conclusion – no problem.

So I hired my own firm. Yep, you guessed it, they found a problem and proposed a solution.

Since the two structural engineering reports differed,the construction company asked me use another firm which they had chosen. This firm said there was no need for a repair.

I had a melt down. I had 20-30 cracks in my walls and there wasn’t a need for repair?

I felt helpless because I have never built a house and do not know much about construction but a friend of mine came by to look at the house and he is a general contractor. He said he hadn’t seen a house with as many cracks as mine had.

There are still deep wounds in my heart from the debacle I went through in the family court system. I had hired lawyers who weren’t worth a penny, experienced injustice from judges and had lost most of my financial worth due to the court battle. So when I suspect someone isn’t being honest with me it goes deep into a world of hurt and I suspected my construction company was being a bit shady.

I thought all kinds of evil thoughts when I was in this place of darkness. I started calling lawyers, thinking I may have to sue. I thought about using this blog to write a post to slander the company and impede their business. Someone suggested I call a TV station and report them.

As I stepped away from the situation in prayer I realized a very important fact.

This suspicion regarding my construction company was not based on reality. Over the years they had fixed a multitude of issues for me and although there were definitely some structural issues, I believe it was due to the original developer more than the construction company. To seek to harm them in any way would just be downright evil.

I had been praying about this situation because I didn’t want to go all out crazy and be a bitch to them when they came over on Friday afternoon. I had a peace and a calm about the meeting even though I suspected they would wash their hands of the problem.

When they came into my house they said that they thought the issue may not be foundation but rather a plumbing issue because they thought my house was actually rising, not sinking. The more I listened, the more they made sense. They were not washing their hands of the issue. They were trying to follow the clues my house was giving them to find a solution to the problem. The more they talked, the greater my respect was for these men and their company. They mapped out a plan to solve the problem and it sounded like a very well thought out plan.

When they left I thanked God for the company and praised God for His tempering of my spirit.

The next morning I had devotions with my boyfriend and happened to pick Psalms 34 as the passage of scripture:

Psalm 34:12-19English Standard Version (ESV)