Love, Sweat and Tears

Today, I gathered with some teens, young adults and a couple other adults for our weekly gathering at Wherry for our summer outreach called Love, Sweat and Tears.  I knew the Bible  passage for our morning devotion was to come from Matthew 5:13-15--salt and light.

Alan Smith, one of our other leaders, alerted me that Bruce Coble (we love Bruce!) had several different jobs we could work on, but the one he would  really like to tackle (if we were up to the challenge) was to clean out an apartment that had been abandoned for about a week.   "Up for the challenge?"  The gauntlet had been thrown.  We would accept the challenge.   I knew that's what we were supposed to do--where we were supposed to be.

Bruce gathered with us after prayer to lay out the conditions we'd be headed into.  He told us that the family had been living in real despair and darkness and abuse.  He encouraged us to pray again before we went to work.

The team was dismissed to gather supplies and walk to the home.  I explained to the kids a little about what we might be in for.  Michael, the property manager at Wherry, told us a little more and encouraged us to go in as warriors, not afraid of spiritual darkness.  We did.

We prayed.  We prayed for our hearts and minds to be protected.  We prayed for the family that had just moved out, who had been unable to receive the blessings of being the Wherry community.  We prayed that God would set them on a new path.  We prayed for this home to be reclaimed as a place of blessing. We prayed for the cycles of poverty and .abuse and hopelessness to be broken.

None of that prepared us for what we would see and smell.  Later in the day, we were saying what we always say,  "Why didn't we take 'before' pictures?"  But today, I thought no.  I would never want the new family to see what this was.  Molly Watkins said it well, "We don't want that image frozen in time."  So we only took pictures of the apartment after three truck loads of garbage and debris had been removed, the carpet had been pulled up, and the windows cleared .

To say that the old windows at Wherry aren't energy efficient is a gross understatement.  To combat this, the family had filled the windows with styrofoam sheets and some sort of insulating foam  There was little to no light in the bedrooms at all.  This added to the despair.  So we pulled down the dust-caked, soiled curtains, disposed of the broken and sad mini-blinds and cut away the stryofoam insulation.  We let the light in.

The team who worked outside scooped up the rankest garbage I've ever seen and smelled.  Really the only thing missing was human waste.  They pulled unimaginable amounts of garbage from the hedges--a couch and a dirt bike were hiding in there.  They trimmed and tamed the wild backyard.  It was shocking the crazy amount of work those kids did out there.

The team inside bagged up vile garbage.  Some too vile to talk about here.  Some things I wish your kids hadn't seen.  Things no child should see.  And this family was living here just a week ago.  In this stuff, this stench, this mess.  Just a week ago.  Oh, Jesus!  My heart cries.

We salvaged some clothes that family had bagged up and some expensive sports equipment just in case they show up in the next week to claim them.  Hopefully the cockroaches will have scurried from the bags if the family comes for them.

We been given a rare opportunity this year.  A few folks (ministry teams from other churches) will work on the apartment on other days, but by and large the rest of our Wednesdays this summer will be spent loving on this apartment.  We don't always get to see a project to completion.  We're often just a step in the process.   We prime the walls.  Another team paints.  We scrape the metal cabinets.  Another teams finishes them.  We scrape up the old tiling from the 50s and another team lays new flooring.  It's a process.   I'm looking forward to seeing our teens spend some extended time in this one home.  Hopefully by the end of the summer, it will be ready for a new family to move in.

So we'll keep being salt and light at this one little corner of Wherry.  Next week we'll scrub and clean and scrape another layer of grime away, getting ready for the next phase.  And slowly, but surely, this house will become a home!

It's a good summer for Love, Sweat and Tears!