big deal

Last Sunday night at family dinner, Mr. Henry kept talking about his gutters.

His dear wife continues to battle cancer and all its complications on hospice, and Henry tries to stay up on everything he used to, and everything she used to, too.

His gutters overflowing has been haunting him to no end, and when he left last Sunday, I finally told Matt, "Babe, I know it's silly, but there is so much he's struggling with that we can't do anything about. We gotta do those gutters."

I used to live with 100 twenty-year old men and women, but these days I don't know many who could help us out.  We've been going to our church for some whole six weeks, but I reached out anyway that night and said, "We need some help helping Henry...and please just tell me if I need to keep looking."

Henry's never going to go to Foundry Church. There was no benefit to the small group of guys who came over after work tonight to work some more. But they came, and were fantastic, and got it all done, and blessed our neighbor, and stayed for dinner, and it's not a big deal.

I didn't understand why the gutters, the gutters, the gutters, were such a big deal.

And the guys tonight didn't understand why helping Henry was such a big deal to me.

But of all the hundreds, hundreds of churches we have been to in our lives, have preached in, have visited, have loved and been loved by... I haven't actually had one since I was a very little girl in lace and white paten leather shoes, sitting next to Lucy and playing with the old-lady veins on her hands. 

When you're nobody...and the church owes you nothing, and you ask for help, and the church shows up for someone they've never met nor will benefit from...and loves well, with kindness and laughter and friendship, when the church gives up an evening and gets dirty and eats together with our neighbor, just because he needed help, just because we asked? 

I'm going to need to figure out how to use the term "my church."

That's my church, this one I barely know, who barely knows me, because, well, they act like it.

Before complaining, I am reminded to ask...before acknowledging gaps and shortcomings, I am reminded to be what I'm wanting her to be.