THE STUCCO, THE SCAFFOLD, AND ME

Besides being an educator most of my life, I was also a contractor.  On one occasion I was preparing to stucco an older house.  An addition had been added to the house and to make it look less like an addition, the intent was to cover the entire exterior of the house with new stucco.  That meant I had to strip all the old stucco from the existing part of the house.  As I often did, I worked well into the night.  On this particular evening, I was still working after 11:00 pm.  I had the scaffold set up on a concrete pad adjacent to the house and was working in the gable end of a two story home.  I had removed all of the old stucco except for a large triangular piece at the top of the wall right under the peak of the roof.  The stucco was held onto the wall by poultry netting.  I used a crowbar to pry the stucco away from the wall until it cracked and then pry the pieces until they broke away from the wall.  As I was prying that last and largest piece of stucco an impression came clearly into my mind.  I was advised to hold onto the scaffold itself rather than just work on the plank that sat on the scaffold.  I didn’t argue.  I wrapped one leg around the end of the scaffold and held on tight with my free arm as I reached with my crowbar to pry that last large piece of stucco.  I expected more resistance than I got.  I had barely pulled on the crowbar when the stucco broke away from the wall, spun slightly on the last remaining thread of wire and then plunged downward, hitting the plank on which I had been standing with such force that it broke in half.  The stucco and the plank crashed onto the hard concrete surface below.  This all happened so quickly I could not have responded fast enough to prevent me from falling with the stucco and the broken plank.  As I watched this unfold and contemplated what might have happened to me had I been standing on that plank as I had intended, my heart was full of gratitude for a loving Heavenly Father who would, through the Holy Ghost, warn me of a danger I could not have anticipated.