Thanks, Mom and Dad and Maryann...

Confession: I wasn't the easiest child to raise...
Wait, why is no one surprised to hear that? ;>

No, really, I wasn't. I questioned everything: I wanted an answer for everything.

I should respect my parents. Why? Just because they're my parents. Then why do I have to earn respect? Shouldn't I be respected just for being who I am, too?

I should do homework. Why? To learn something. But I already learned it during class. To get good grades. Why? To get into college. Why? To get a good job. Why? What job could I possibly get where the ability to do homework was needed?

It's not hard to understand why one of my mom's bylines was "Because I said so!"

I insisted on trying to do things a different way every time--even when the task was mundane. (My mom still loves to use the example that I tried to do the dishes differently each night. Dishes? Really? How much variety do you need for doing the dishes? Just do them and get it over with--and then go do something fun!!)

I complained a lot, too. I distinctly remember telling my parents, with a fair amount of seriousness, that the only reason they'd had children was so that we could be unpaid household laborers for them.

Sigh.... Sorry, Mom and Dad.

Among a million other feelings I experienced on this trip, I had a few distinct moments where I appreciated each of my parents, and my sister, separately...

When we arrived on Sunday, we had 26 people and their luggage to get from the airport to the camp. One of our vehicles was a pickup truck, and someone made the smart move of deciding to load luggage into the back of it. I saw the first few bags go in, and I thought, that's not the most efficient way... My mother is an amazing organizer and packer. She can fit amazing things into unbelievable space. And while I've not mastered things the way she has, I'm pretty good. So I jumped in the back of the truck, reorganized what was already in there, and started calling out to folks to bring their bags over. We fit probably 24 suitcases in that truck, all secure for highway speeds. I thought about my mom, and I was grateful for her.

Monday morning, I volunteered to help with the breakfast clean up. Our task consisted of disassembling the assembly line where all the volunteers had made their own lunches. We needed to close up the loaves of bread, snap the lids onto the lunch meat & cheese, the peanut butter and jelly, the buckets of celery and baby carrots, then load everything onto carts, roll them back into the kitchen, and wipe off the tables. At one moment, I observed someone else wiping off the table, literally just gently dragging the rag across the table top...

Now, I'm all about doing a good job. And I am all about finding the right jobs for people. And I can be a take-charge kind of girl. So that's what I did. I immediately found another task for the young man to do, set him about it, then took his rag. I instantly knew why he hadn't been scrubbing the tables: he hadn't even wrung out the rag properly. In my head, I heard myself say, "You've got to be kidding me... Who doesn't know how to wipe off a table?!"


But my next thought was, "Thank you, Mom. Thank you for teaching me how to wring out a rag. Thank you for showing me how to really scrub a table to get the jelly off it. Thank you for teaching me to not just brush the crumbs onto the floor. Thanks for ensuring that I systematically clean the whole table so no spots are left untouched. Thanks for making me work fast and get the job done..."
 
Tuesday, I was painting trim work--door frames and floor molding. Some of the molding was just stacked outside--not cut yet--and I remembered doing things like that with my family. Painting ahead of time: very smart. But some molding had already been installed without being painted. So I also found myself painting trim work along the floor. I've done my share of painting in my life. And the neat thing is, my sister can paint trim work like nobody's business. She doesn't use painter's tape; she doesn't need it. She has such a steady hand and good technique. She can "cut" a room (hand paint trim lines floor and ceiling) faster than I can roll the paint on the walls. She's amazing. And she taught me how to do it, too. I'm not as good as her--and don't really want the practice it would take to get there!! But I can paint the trim in almost the same amount of time it takes other people to put up painter's tape... So thanks, Maryann, for your patience with me. Thanks for showing me how to paint. Thanks for being my teacher when you would come home from kindergarten and set up "school" in the backyard and teach me everything you'd learned that day. Thanks for being my teacher when you were learning French in the 7th grade and you taught me the alphabet and how to count. Thanks for being the one to tell me that Mom and Dad deserved my respect just for being my parents. Thanks for taking me to my first real hair stylist...
 
The Roof job Wednesday and Thursday held different challenges, different opportunities for me to realize I know how to do some things. Someone asked for a locking wrench: I knew what that would look like and was able to find one. Someone asked for a chalk line: I knew what that was, and was able to find one. Someone else was using a saw to rip a peice of plywood and offered me the chance to do it; I declined, realizing I already knew what "ripping" was, knew how to do that, had been given that opportunity growing up. I caught a whiff of sawdust and I was transported back across decades to sitting in my dad's workshop, and I was grateful for my dad. Thank you, Dad, for teaching me about miter saws and belt sanders and drill presses and sandpaper grit and socket sets and chuck keys and router bits and R-values and quarter-round and epoxy and circuit breakers... Thank you for "measure twice, cut once." Thanks for thinking out loud through the projects you worked on so I would learn how to think, too. Thanks for including me, for never letting me feel like I was in the way, for turning me into an excellent planner and helper...

God does not make mistakes. We are not here by accident. The family into which I was born was chosen for me for a reason, and while I may have--strike that, while I KNOW I have caused them grief at various points in my life, I also know that they have loved me unconditionally, supported me through my poor choices, and nurtured me into the (reasonably) responsible, intelligent, patient adult I am today. Their influence on me cannot be measured, must not be underestimated, and, as of today, will not go unappreciated:

Thanks, Mom and Dad and Maryann, for your work in shaping who I am. And thanks, God, for my family.

Thursday

Greetings from the Deep South. I spent another day on The Roof job, but there is another portion to the work. The Roof itself is the covering for a cement floor living area being used for storage and as a work shop. (It reminds me of a garage except that there is no overhead door.) And that entire room flooded during Katrina--not just from the storm surge, but also from the rain through the damaged roof. So the structure needed new shingles on the roof as well as a new ceiling from where the rain came through. And that's not to mention that the drywall has all been cut off at the knees (from four feet of flooding).

The Roof job, like some others, has challenged me sometimes in terms of wondering why the people who live there aren't "doing more." As I mentioned earlier, the homeowners have not been around this week, but since we are working in the work shop area, it is obvious that the man who lives there is a skilled handyman. He has a plethora of tools, from all sorts of different home repair disciplines. Scattered amongst the workbenches and on the floor around it, we found drywall screws and tape, staple guns, locking wrenches, socket sets, and tons more. And the home owner's son is an electrician. So, couldn't they have done this work on their own?

As these thoughts began to surface in my mind, I decided to ignore them and began my work in the room. Damaged furniture, children's toys, sporting gear, and tool shop materials are all jumbled in together, amidst apparently broken appliances. Our first task was to pick up the room. We threw everything in boxes to get it on one side of the room so that we could begin taking down the ceiling. I would just grab a box and start picking stuff up off the floor around it until the box seemed full--so one box might have a doll's hairbrush, a lone sock, a screw driver, a blanket... There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, either before or after we stacked everything up. Next, we moved all the boxes to one portion of the room. My next task was to remove the air vents (registers) from the ceiling. Let me tell you what that was like:

I look at the ceiling. The registers are too high to reach. I need a step stool. I look around and find a nearby chair instead. I look at the register. The screws are Phillips head. I look for a screwdriver. I find one, but it is a flat head. I keep digging. I find another flat head. And another, and another, and another, but no Phillips head. I run across a cordless drill. Is it charged? Yes! Does it have bits? Only a flat head. Sigh. There HAS to be a Phillips head bit here somewhere; I think I saw one earlier. Where was that? Which box did I throw that in? Or am I just thinking I saw a bit? I start looking at the boxes around me. There is NO WAY I am ever going to find a bit in the boxes I have just filled. I go back to the workbench and find a small box of Phillips head bits. Yay! They are shorter bits, designed for a power screwdriver, not a cordless drill--but I am going to use it anyway. I place a bit in and tighten the chuck. I stand on the chair, and reach the drill up to the ceiling, and discover that I have chosen a bit that is too large. I try to release the chuck but can't get it to budge. I suppose that's what I get for not tightening it by hand. Back down off the chair, I have to find someone else to get it loose for me. Then back to the box of bits. This time I test the bit before putting it in the drill. I find the right one, put it in, tighten the chuck, back on the chair, and FINALLY remove the two screws holding up the vent. I am getting somewhere!! I move the chair to the second vent, step up on it, and end up on the ground. The leg of the chair gave way as I stood on it. As I attempt to fit the pieces back together, I take a closer look at the bottom of the chair and realize that all the legs of it have been repaired with what looks like expanding spray foam. No wonder it didn't work. Now I need a step ladder. There is one, in the shed at the other end of the house. I find it amidst rusted metal hardware and a kitchen table--the water-damaged top resting against one wall, its four matching legs across the room. I return to the workshop...

This is only the beginning. I won't walk you through such detail on finding a staple gun and staples--but not the right size staples for the gun. I won't walk you through finding three right-hand gloves and not a single left-hand glove. I won't discuss how the heat and humidity left me soaked in sweat that dripped--not just beaded or rolled, but dripped--from my eyebrows, my nose, my lips--and this was while "indoors" in the morning, and not doing heavy labor...

What dawned on me this day was the overwhelming frustration of trying to accomplish even a small task when you can't find what you're looking for--things you know you own, but you can't find. Imagine if someone came to your home and scattered the contents of your kitchen, some ending up in your dresser, in your storage closet, in your children's rooms, in your bathroom. What would it take for you to feel like making dinner when you came home?



Over the course of several days, I have spent several hours on this post, thinking, writing, thinking, thinking, thinking, and I still don't have the answers. I don't know what it all means. I don't have a nice little wrap-up. Two things I do know: that God has created some very special people who are capable of doing disaster recovery work, and that I hope I never need their specialized assistance.

From the Road

Sorry, guys, but I'm clearly more of a novelist than a blogger, so I'm still not done with yesterday's entry. I have much more to say but it'll be coming a little more slowly. Thank you for your prayers!

A "Nice" Person

Yesterday, I posted about the different work sites we had: the house I worked on with painting and drywall mudding, a house that needed tiling work done, and the house that needed a new roof. We had the same three sites today, but switched some people around in order to give everyone a chance to meet and get to know different people. So today, I was on a different work site.

Now, before I discuss this, I should say that I am not a fan of roofs. I do not go on roofs. I did not want to go on the roof job, and that is probably precisely why God sent me there. Yes, God sent me to The Roof. (And yes, it is a proper noun...) The Roof was in Pascagoula, and in this case, we did not get to meet the homeowners: it was much more focused on the manual labor--and trust me, this was labor. Intense heat somehow gets worse when you are 12-20 feet off the ground and dealing with shingles... The tar on the back of the shingles was so hot that we had to be sure not to turn them up the right way until we were ready to place them, because they would start sticking to the "felt" paper and rip up little pieces of it.

However, we did some amazing work, working informally in pairs on both sides of the roof at the same time, some with nails and hammers, some with nail guns. We made ridiculously good progress, right up until the moment when we ran out of supplies. It turned out that someone had incorrectly measured the roof and thus ordered the wrong amount of supplies for the job. So we were suddenly stuck without materials. We made the proper phone calls, and took a break for lunch while waiting for the supplies to arrive. That turned out to be a much longer wait than we anticipated; like, three hours worth of waiting.

That was frustrating. We feel confident that we could have finished the job today had we only had what we needed. We would have liked for things to have gone differently. We would have liked to have all the supplies we needed, or to have them delivered more quickly. We would have liked to have finished the job so we could tackle something new tomorrow.

But we are not in charge.

God is.

We used our time to protect our bodies, by drinking water, eating lunch, and resting. Some of us took naps. Some of us bumped a volleyball around, other flipped a frisbee around. We listened to music, sang out loud with some of it, and played several rounds of Bananagrams. (You'll have to look that one up.) But most of all, we continued to work on relationships, to share what God has been doing in our lives.

And God has indeed been working in our lives. For myself, he has revealed all kinds of things within my heart that should not be there. I've found that there are areas of life where I am selfish, areas of life where I am covetous, areas where I am jealous, and areas where I try to take possession of things that are not mine--stealing.

This is hard to deal with. I like to think of myself as a nice person. I like for OTHER people to think of me as a nice person. And that is something I can do most of the time: I am warm enough, friendly enough, accommodating enough that most people I meet like me sufficiently well. And I get the label of being a "good person." But God is not interested in making me a nice person. God is interested in refining my character, to make me a loving, compassionate person NOT JUST when other people are looking, or when other people are nice to me, or when I've had enough sleep, or when I feel like life is fair...

I don't know where this will lead me. I only know that as God places these things on my heart, it is my job to acknowledge what He is telling me and to be open with Him and give Him permission to change me. The changing work itself is up to Him. I know I can be "confident of this, that he who began a good work in [me] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."

Amen and amen, Lord. Do your work in me.

Work of Restoration

A new day brought totally new experiences. Since we finished yesterday's job so many days ahead of schedule, there was a bit of a scramble this morning for the camp's work managers to find jobs we could do. We ended up being split into 3 groups, each with a different work site and different tasks to be done. One group worked on a roof--no small feat for this kind of heat. Another group was dispatched to help a hoarder empty a trailer of expired food and rotten memories.

I was in a group of 5 girls who went to help a homeowner finish painting a few rooms, and drywall mud a bathroom that is gutted except for a tub. The home was near the coastline in Pascagoula, and had flooded during Katrina. The homeowner--a retiree and former baseball coach we'll call Dale--put roughly $100,000 into repairs, but was bilked out of it by dishonest workmen. And this is one of the saddest of all the Katrina themes, that in the midst of disaster, while some portions of humanity band together to help one another, there are other portions that will take the same opportunity to steal from those already suffering.

So how is Dale reacting to this? We really don't know. How deeply can you delve into someone's life in a few hours midst primer and paint and drywall mud? He seemed depressed. The grass around the house was easily 10 inches high. He didn't have much to say when we arrived. But he was not unkind to us, and he seemed to warm to us through the day. Late in the afternoon, he spoke to a few of the girls and told us that, despite the awful experience of the storm, the damage, and then being cheated by contractors, he would not trade that for the experiences he has had with the volunteers this year.

We may paint molding and sand drywall, but there are other restorations that the volunteers here are making: we are restoring faith in humanity, in compassion, and in the God who placed that compassion in the hearts of volunteers like us. This is the work of restoration. This is why we are here.

Setting the Bar to Blow It Away

There are more volunteers here this particular week than there have been for some time. We are about 150  all together, including the delegation from Grace Fellowship Church; a group of friends from Texas, Florida, and Tennessee; a group from the Bronx, New York; and a Habitat for Humanity Group arriving just now. This influx of volunteers is much appreciated by the staff running this camp, as they are feeling the pressure of promises they made to homeowners even as the money to keep the camp going is running out.

Today, they had one particular large job. There was a park with a mulch walkway that was falling apart. The plan is to rip out the walkway, and use the mulch for all the trees and playground areas after weeding them. (They will eventually redo the walkway with asphalt.)

We used crowbars and hammers to break apart the composite barriers that were supposed to be holding up the walkway. We lifted the beams--about 6" x 14'--onto trucks, then took them to another site and dumped them. We raked mulch, and put it around the bases of easily 75-100 trees. We were thrilled that this park had a little "water playground" area. At lunch, we ran through the fountains to rinse ourselves off, then played frisbee with some neighborhood kids. (We'll be remembering Malik and Victoria in our prayers!) As the afternoon went on, a few families came to the park as well. In the midst of our work, we had the opportunity to talk to them. They asked us who we were and where we were from. (Our "northern accents" gave us away pretty quickly.) We shared our story of why we are here, and asked them about their experiences.

Toward the end of the work day, I was walking by a picnic area. A family with three young children (and one large dog!) was conversing with a few members of our group. As I walked past, I overheard the father say, "Well, on behalf of all the people of Mississippi, we thank you for your help."

We do not work for recognition. We do not work for the praise of men. We do not work so that our efforts will be praised. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy his heartfelt declaration of appreciation. It just means that we keep working whether we hear this kind of encouragement or not.

Those who coordinate the camp and volunteer work here estimated that this job would take 40 people 3-5 days to complete. Since the delegation from our church is large (26 people, it turns out, not 28), they sent our entire group to that site. We were joined by the another group of about 4 men--so about 30 of us all together......We finished the entire job today. It's amazing what a group of motivated people can do when they are committed to the work, and the job has God's protection and provision. We are in awe of what He enabled us to accomplish today, and I'm so excited about what different adventure God will have for us tomorrow.

We're just honored to have the opportunity to be His body and share His love by helping hurting people.

On the way to the work site. Vibrating with excitement at the possibilities ahead of us today, at the chance to have my life, my energy, my heart poured out in service to hurting people.