Help and Hope
I feel particularly fortunate and grateful today. But there are folks in the Nashville area who may not feel as fortunate at the moment. They are alive, but they have lost a substantial portion of their belongings and suffered extensive damage to their property. Some have lost loved ones. Nashville itself has lost some of its historical artifacts. While the city has patched itself back together for the short term, work is still ongoing for long-haul recovery.
The news media has not fully conveyed the extent of the damage from recent flooding in Middle Tennessee nor the devastation for a huge number of individuals, families, and businesses. Many of these families and businesses did not have flood insurance. That’s the dark side.
On the brighter side, Nashvillians are pulling together to help one another. Neighbors who didn’t know each other before the flood have become friends and collaborators. Those unaffected by the flood waters are sharing with and caring for those who were effected beyond imagining. You too can pitch in to help. If you would like to help those effected by the flood, visit this website and find out how:
And thank you to the Tall Girl Skinny staff at songwriter Marshall Chapman’s newsletter for sharing this info with their readership so that I might share it with you.
In fact, lets go with this thought of helping our fellow human beings in need. Let’s think about what it must be like to see all you own or most of what you own gone in a matter of hours or minutes. I understand this feeling all too well, but my loss was by fire five and a half years ago.
On Christmas morning I was reading poetry in the living room and my husband William was working on a sculpture in his shed, a.k.a. studio. The lights went off and I got up and walked toward the breaker box thinking all I had to do to fix the situation was flick a breaker. But when I crossed the threshold to the kitchen I smelled wood burning. We didn’t have a working fireplace. I spun toward the side door and ran to the shed.
“I smell wood burning in the house,” I called to William as I rounded the corner of the shed. He came out and turned with me toward the house to see a plume of black smoke pouring from the eve of the attic in the old cabin at the core of our house.
“Call 911,” William said as we both rushed to the house. The phone was in a single story addition at the opposite end of the house from the cabin. I made the call, and as I hung up the phone, William came from the other part of the house with his guns under his arms. I went to our bedroom, a former lean-to at the back of the cabin, and grabbed the big Tupperware box full of a life-time’s worth of pictures and family photos from previous generations and took them outside. William grabbed our computer and then our printer while I raked framed photos from shelves and tables into paper grocery sacks and tossed them onto the grass. I always joke when I tell this story that we are so Southern we grabbed the guns and the photos first.
Just that week I had sent the final draft of my novel Sufficient Grace to my editor and pulled all my old writing out of file drawers and boxes and tossed the pages and notes into a laundry basket. I was planning to go through it between Christmas and New Year’s to decide on my next writing project. I took the laundry basket full of papers out the door.
“Get clothes next,” William said to me as we passed each other at the doorway. “This is our last trip.” Most of my clothes were in the washer, unbeknownst to me just under the location of the fire’s origin. I stood at the washer pulling things out of the machine and putting them in yet another laundry basket when I remembered an antique print that meant a great deal to William and me, a print we’d taken images from for our wedding invitations. I left the close where they were and grabbed the print off the living room wall and left the house for the last time as the sirens whined up the driveway and into our yard.
My sweet husband had grabbed a coat for each of us. We stood in the front yard amid the fire engines and watched flames lick at the house we had hoped to remodel or replace. The horses stood at a safe distance. The dogs and cats were all accounted for. William walked around the house not fifteen minutes after the fire trucks arrived and said our bedroom was gone. This was 8:30 AM on Christmas morning. If it had happened a few hours earlier, we might not have made it out of the building. As we stood there and watched most of our stuff burn, we realized how little stuff really means, who happy we were to be alive and have each other and our children and grandchildren. We considered later how fragile plans can be and how resilient the human spirit, if you can only hang onto the hope-filled attitude.
News about the fire went out immediately, and we received help from friends and strangers alike. We met neighbors and got to know neighbors who were before only acquaintances. Because our friends and family and community pulled together, we were never without a place to stay or clothes to wear or food to eat. We had help cleaning up the mess and help as we started building a new house. And, because my husband and I are both optimists, we were never with out hope or a positive vision for the future.
We are a long way from that fire today, and we are still recovering in material ways. In spite of that, good things have come from the changes that were thrust upon us.
I guess this month’s theme is becoming change and opportunity. If change strikes in a negative way, it may be a blessing unfolding. That sounds shmarmy, I know, but it may be true just the same.
By the same token, if you see disaster or devastation strike others, you are presented with an opportunity to help your fellow human beings. It’s an opportunity for you to become part of your community in large and small, but significant, ways. Become part of your neighborhood family, become a wealth of hope to those in need—whether you offer someone a free place to live, as our good friends Janice and Ben did for us when they made an empty trailer on their property available, or only donate rags and cleaning supplies to make it possible for someone to wipe the mud out of their flooded home. Seize this opportunity to be part of the solution and part of someone’s recovery and hope for a positive future.
We have just passed the Sunday of Pentecost, a time during the liturgical year when Christians celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit. The story is in the Book of Acts. Tongues of fire hovered above the heads of Mary and the Apostles as they were infused with the Spirit and began to speak to those people around them from foreign lands, and everyone understood what they said as if Mary and the Apostles spoke in a common language.
Today, let our common language be help and hope. Let it be give and receive.
The scene storm word list for today comes from the Book of Acts:
companions
course
rushed
uproar
flesh
deputy
worms
basket
bond
scatter
