I used to blog all the time. It was my outlet. A way to tell the world my thoughts. I’ve been busy lately though, really really busy. Everyone is, right? We are all running around trying to keep up. Sometimes too busy to stop and look around us to see what’s happening.
Last week, Tuesday, my girls came home from school and FaceTimed me with their phone turned outwards in the basement. I heard rushing water, a sound not fit for a basement. Our basement had flooded everywhere. Everywhere. Water in every part of the floor, in every room, over everything carpeted and upholstered. I told them I would be home in 15 minutes. I turned around from where I was heading to and came back and assess the damage. I don’t get overwhelmed much. I’m an eternal optimist and try to always keep a right perspective. Not a lot shakes me up but as I walked down into my new “pool” formerly known as my finished basement, I stood there for a moment, paralyzed and not knowing where to start. I kept thinking, I’m a designer I should know how to fix this. As I ran through the rolodex of my contractors in my mind, trying to think of a name to call, I got a text from a friend. My daughter had told her daughter our basement had flooded (word travels fast with teens). My friend said I heard your basement is flooded here is a name of a restoration company to call and I’m coming over to help get everything out of the basement with you. I called her and just said, I’m at my bottom. I can’t take one more thing happening in our lives. I can’t. She said I know but you can and I’m coming over. And she did. And so did my mom and the restoration guy. 4 fans, 1 dehumidifier and an entire basement of soaked padding and carpet later, we have a claim and new carpet coming. No memory stuff was lost. Just stuff. It was taken care of.
We went a couple more days into the week and we had another situation with my mother in law who is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. That time we had no help. We just muddled through the best we knew how because situations with her happen almost on a weekly basis at this point.
Life throws some hard punches at times. Some times it hits harder for some people more than others. Sometimes it shifts and those other people get hit hard while us others are recouping.
Jim laughs at me because every now and then I throw on some old school Keith Green to remind me of what our walk in this life should really look like. Good ole’ extreme living, unashamed, uncompromised and doing something with life more than simply being busy and existing.
By the end of the week I felt so beat up. If I can be painfully honest I said that’s it. I had reached my limit of punches and I was done. I’ve been swinging for years now and I. Was. Over. It. I don’t know what “done” looks like but I had reached it and I wanted off this crazy train of one fire after the next having to be put out for years now. I was sick of all these problems and I thought if a person had only 1 of these problems they would be self medicating and here we have I don’t even know how many! But by the end of Friday night though, I stopped being dramatic and feeling sorry for myself. I put on Keith Green and started to listen to the words of my favorite song of his, Asleep in the LightLink here . I began to process through a lot of things but mostly how we do church here in this country and what we do as Christians when people are going through something hard a lot of times. We see a post or hear of someone going through something and we give our pat Christian answer...praying 🙏🏼 and then we go about our day, cross it off our list because after all we said we prayed for them so that should cover them but more importantly, it should cover us so we don’t feel too bad about our busy lives and how these lives just cannot hold one more thing in them and our lives sure as heck can’t take on somebody else’s problems. So a prayer should hold them over. The crazy thing is, are we even praying for them at all or are those just empty words like how are you, have a great day, get well soon? I sometimes wonder if the “praying 🙏🏼” is in the same category as those other pleasantries. Don’t get me wrong, we need people praying and those who REALLY are praying, we need you, desperately because prayer changes things and I know that in my own life and can feel when someone really is praying for me but the casual praying emoticons, is that doing anything to help anyone?
Keith Green talks about the Church being asleep in the light...meaning we aren’t awake, aren’t alive and sure as heck aren’t doing much for anyone else around us. He sings about that Scripture verse in James “Go in peace, good day and we go about your way but what good is it if we aren’t helping each other” and he rebukes us, the Church, for doing that very thing. Our empty words and pleasantries that have no action to them and especially if you’re not even praying. It’s not the praying that’s the problem, it’s the words with no actions that are the problem.
I’ve made it my goal to stop saying “praying 🙏🏼“ for everyone unless I really am praying but more than that, unless I start actually doing something about it while praying. I want to assume that once someone says please pray for me, they are at a breaking point and I want to help them and not look the other way because I am busy. When my friend came over and rolled up her sleeves and helped move a ton of junk out of my basement, I was inspired to live that way. I thought, that’s how we should live. That’s what the Church looks like to me. I don’t want to be that person that casually says hey I’ll pray but I never do anything to help or support. What good is anything if I never get my hands dirty with anything anyone is going through? It’s lonely to fight battles alone. I know there are times when we have to do things alone but many many more times in Scripture we are called to live this life together. Living life as the Church should consist of more than praying emoticons or prayer chains of emails saying we will pray but never really coming in contact with each other’s messy lives. It calls us to carry one another’s burdens and we can’t do that from a distance unwilling to get in, support or help.
So, I’m not really going to stop praying but I am going to make it my goal this year to not be so passive with those words. I know what it’s like to hear people casually say I’m praying but never really do much past that. I want to try my hardest to not be that person. I want to be a doer. I want to be the person who sits across from a hurting person and wipes away their tears or just listens, encourages, does small gestures, that I be a person who does something..anything. Who’s with me? Can we please wake up and slow our lives down a half a second to look around at those of us who are drowning in a flooded basement and roll up our sleeves and help (and, hey, you can even say a prayer while you’re helping 😉)!
