I wanted to write out a few thoughts while they are pretty fresh in my mind. I have just finished up a three day work trip with a team of folks from work. We were assisting with flood recovery from the summer's floods in East Iowa. It has been an interesting experience for me. While I have been facilitating work trips for the better part of the last eight years, I haven't been on a work trip since high school. It has been nice to be on this end of things and it has given me a lot to consider as I think about how we do things.
First and foremost, I'm exhausted! I'm sore. I'm tired. I don't necessarily want to be around people, though I do thoroughly enjoy the team I am working with. But after three days, I am spent. We have high schoolers work for five days. Ugh! Sure I could do more, but right now, I'm really glad we're done.
Second, I need to do more manual labor. Not just because it is a good thing to do or a manly thing to do, but because on some level I find it very enjoyable. I'm not particularly skilled. I can do most things if I've shown how. I'm very good at demolition, which we did a lot of the last two days. Even though I am spent, I like the feeling of having "worked", not just sat behind a computer. I like seeing things accomplished, even if it is the dismantling of a wall. I also find that there is plenty of time to either think or converse while working. I need to find more ways to be more physically active.
Third, it is really hard to be faced with total loss. Yesterday we started the day doing demo of walls. It is really easy to forget that you are working on someone's house when you're just tearing down walls. Then we went down to work on the basement. It had been completely flooded. It suddenly became very real when we started dumping out this family's record collection, children's clothing, and Christmas decorations. Somehow it was the decorations that got to me. I started imagining Christmas for this family. In my imagination, it wasn't a very fun holiday. We met the homeowner very briefly. She seemed like se had resigned herself to moving on. Which she should. That's healthy. Still, I was hurting for her. And I know she hurting more than she wanted to show in front of a group of strangers who were gutting her house.
Parts of Cedar Rapids looked post-apocalyptic. The streets were quiet. Many of the homes were gutted. We heard that over 5,000 houses were flooded to some extent. It is hard to imagine that kind of devastation. It is also hard to imagine how we just go on with our lives while devastation on that level is still being recovered from. But we do it al the time. We just go along while others struggle through their personal and communal calamities....
I don't know. That's too bleak of an assessment. I saw a lot of people in these last couple of days giving of themselves in selfless ways. Some not inspired by faith, just by the desire to help and to do the right thing. Perhaps there is a greater sense of us all being in this thing together than what is publicized. Today after lunch we heard a conversation on NPR about religion in politics. One thing I heard was a mention of how politicians play up differences in order to create the us vs. them; whether that is a partisan us v. them, a racial one, or a religious one. It isn't just politicians that do that, but it is pronounced in politics. I think working in situations like this, the "them" sort of disappears and the "us" enlarges.
Here's to the ever increasing "us". Hopefully it won't always take calamities to make the "us" grow.
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