Sap Anyone?
I wasn’t very sappy until my marriage started falling apart about 5 years ago. I had begun to take my marriage for granted and just assumed that I was always going to be married. What a wake up call I had! Crying about things just wasn’t a part of my life. There was an extremely long period of time in which a tear never touched my face. But when that which I held highest, my family, was threatened by a someone from within my family I found that my tear glands were still active. Very active.
Nowadays I go through times when my emotions are hardened and I couldn’t cry about anything. Other times I find that my tears tend to flow a little easily about seemingly insignificant things. Usually I’m alone when that happens but sometimes it happens around friends and family at church or at the movies. Most of the time I cry when someone is touched in a deep way such as when a need is met. Tonight was no exception.
My son went to his mom’s house to stay the night since I had him on Friday and I decided to watch TV instead of working out. I channel surfed a while and was about to turn it off when I saw a commercial for ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Tonight’s show was about a family that within the past year was close to losing a farm due the death of a husband. I tried to pull myself away because I knew full well that I would bawl like a baby. But I couldn’t and watched the whole thing.
It was amazing. Just the thought of the show was enough to start my eyes watering. I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy night but I hung in there and accepted the inevitable. If you didn’t watch the show then you missed a wonderful example of community love. Here are a some of the before and after pictures from the ABC website:
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition - Elcano Family pictures
I cried throughout the whole thing. Nobody was around so I had nothing to lose by not restraining my emotions. The small town this family lived in all pulled together and donated their time and resources to not only build them a new home in a week but also to get the farm business back on its feet. A 6,000 sqft barn was build and filled with donated bales of hay, farm equipment was donated, a new car and truck were given to them and the surrounding farmers plowed and seeded the family’s 20 acres. Oh yeah, Randy Travis also put on a benefit concert to raise money for an education fund for the lady’s children. All of that and much more in 7 days. It was amazing.
I also mourned the fact that the Christian community hadn’t done something like this earlier. After just completing a forty-day campaign called The 40 Days of Community with my wonderful church, that sense of giving to my community is very strong. It’s close to The 40 Days of Purpose, which is based on “the Purpose Driven Life, in that instead of finding out “what on earth am I here for” a church as a group asks, “what on earth are we here for”. It’s a little dry at first because one expects to find out more about who they are in Christ. But what is discovered instead is what our purpose as a local church is. It was an amazing experience especially the home group meeting during the week. The relationships I developed in that group will last because we realize that we weren’t meant to do it alone. We learned that we needed each other’s prayers, encouragement, smiles, hugs of understanding and unconditional love.
Acts 2:44, “And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common;” and Acts 4:32, “And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them.” come to mind when I reflect on this topic.
