Episode Transcript
It is all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea with my story of a white picket fence. Welcome to miracles in the 21st century.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. When my wife and I were first married, we'd bought an old house in the little village of Glenhugen, south of Hobart in Tasmania.
The house had been empty for some time, but it had, I felt, a lot of potential. As you can see in this particular photo, the house needed painting, needed quite a bit of work. And you can see in particular the old lattice fence around the property.
So the property was set on one and a half acres and then the area around the fence, perhaps the area of about a quarter of an acre, had been fenced off separately from the one and a half acres. Well, my wife and I set about renovating our house, painting it, and particularly concentrating on the inside of the house. At that time, it wasn't long before we were having our first child, a little girl.
And my wife said to me, said, well, our little girl will be starting to crawl around, we really need to replace that old fence because it partly fallen down and there are holes in it and so forth. And I said, yeah, no, that's fine, I can put a nice pig wire fence around, it won't take much at all. And my wife said, well, I don't want a pig wire fence, I want a white picket fence.
And I had so much on at the time, working and trying. There were lots of things to do around the house and trying to start a garden and so forth. And I just said to her, well, it's not going to happen, it's just too much work.
And my wife said, well, I don't care, I'm going to pray about it. And I remember we had this discussion on a Saturday night and my wife, as we were having worship that night, she prayed that she would be able to get a white picket fence the next day I would take. On the Sunday, it was a tradition to take our rubbish up to the tip.
There was no rubbish collection service in the village. There was an official council tip nearby and that's where you took your rubbish. And I hadn't given any more thought to the fence situation.
In my mind it was going to be a wire fence around that I'd bust by a roll of wire and we'd run that around. But as I was driving up through the village on my way to the tip, there was a fellow that I knew from church with his tractor and forks on the Back of the tractor lifting out a white picket fence around his house. And so I stopped and I said hey Norm, well what are you, what are you doing? And he said well, Lucille wants to have the American look around the house where you don't have a fence but you have like just hedges and open.
So they had a lovely Cape Cod sort of dormer window style, two story timber home, very much like homes you see in America. And the, they don't have the white picket fence, they sort of open in hedges and gardens. And so I said to Norm, I said well what are you going to do with the fence? He said oh I'm just going to burn it.
And I said well, can I have it? He said sure, I'll bring it up. And so he proceeded to lift out this section of fence and bring it up to my place and he saw my, our old lattice fence was still in place. And he said, oh no worries John.
He said I'll lift out the old fence for you. So he lifted out the old fence and what we found was that the fence posts were exactly the same distance apart. So as the old posts were lifted out of the hole, we were actually just able to drop the new sections of fence, the new lengths of fence in and the holes were the right distance apart was amazing.
But there's more. So the fence portion around our house at the time, one side was the boundary fence with our next door neighbours and then there were three other fence sides which were the white picket fence sides. And in each of those sides was a small gate, gate to the front, a gate to the side and a gate to the rear.
Well, you wouldn't believe it but this fence came with three gates as well, three matching gates. And if you look at this photo now, you can see the fence. Now admittedly that's after I've repainted the fence, although it was in pretty good nick and you could see how we'd improved the garden and everything.
But that's the amazing fence that God provided with the three gates and just the right size the next day. Again, it amazes me what a wonderful God we have and how our prayers can be answered. And I have never forgotten that prayer that my wife prayed on that Saturday night for a white picket fence.
I'm Dr. John Ashton, have a great day.
