Big Easy Day 4

Quick post because I'm wiped out.

Day 4 was terrific. We've been assigned 2 homes to gut...as you know if you read the earlier posts. And we are going to get done ahead of schedule. They weren't quite sure if we'd get both done or not...and we're going to finish home 2 around noon tomorrow. In other words, we've gelled well as a team and we've done a great job. They've seen lots of teams come and go--we're one in a long line of other groups--and we're proving to be really productive in terms of output. That's cool!!! I have to admit that I got about 4 calls this morning and I missed over an hour of work on the home while I did other things...so, if I'm bragging, it's more bragging in the others who make up our team.

Spiritual insight for the day...as we tear out rotten sheetrock, we have huge piles of crumbled junk--all shapes and sizes, lying there in a huge dusty jumble. We have to do that tear out and then we have to remove all the sheetrock into the debris pile. So, we do a contant cycle of tear out (a whole room at a time) and then removal. Shoveling crumbled sheetrock is incredibly hard. We have about a dozen different shovels, all of varying sizes. I've tried all of them. Most were basically useless, until I tried the old rusty one. It's a flat headed shovel, and the steel part is well rusted. The wood part is beaten badly. But, once I tried it, it worked beautifully. That shovel could not possibly shovel snow, nor be used to dig a hole in a garden. BUT, it's the only shovel that can reliably shovel sheetrock. Reminds me of our spiritual gifting--we might not be the newest or most sturdy shovel around, but God still wants us in his tool shed--and he's gonna use us for something that we're perfectly designed and equipped to do. Shoveling sheetrock isn't glamorous, but that shovel made the job incredibly easy and saved us lots of time and energy. That's how God's toolbox works.

One more day!!

Bleach and Beach

Day 3 was great. Lots accomplished. We actually finished the house we started on Day 1, which is an impressive feat. Beatrice's house is now totally stripped to the studs, and I spent the last hour in the place spraying bleach on all the woodwork to kill off the remnants of any mold. Thank God for great masks. I didn't even smell a hint of bleach. People in the yard were complaining of the strong smell, but I didn't even get a whiff. Cool. The next teams to come along will insulate, re-wire and sheetrock the home. Flooring will follow, and she can move back in in a few weeks, maybe a month.

As we finished that home, we moved directly across the road and started on a new home. This is a home owned by a widow in her 70's. She and her husband worked hard--he was a concrete contractor--and they had a pretty nice place. Pool in the back, a couple boats--very upscale for this neighborhood. A large tree fell right on top of their pontoon boat, and the pool is full of black, fetid water.

Joyce, the widow, hasn't been in the home for more than 15 minutes or so since the storm. So, going in is a health risk with mold and mildew. The water line is over 5' tall. We got in and moved some furniture. After that, we were able to start some serious tear-out. We put out this afternoon, in a big way. That house is bigger than Beatrice's, probably twice the size, but we've gotten this almost 75% torn out. Joyce stopped by while we were there and she told us that she hasn't come over before because it was too overwhelming. Now, she could see trmendous progress and she was actually starting to get excited about maybe moving back home sometime.

On our way home, we took a 15 minute detour and went to Lake Pontchartrain, the large lake to our South and to the North of New Orleans. We could look across and see N.O. 25 miles in the distance. Pontchartrain is brackish water--mixed salt and fresh. Pretty amazing to see such a large body of water where the sea and Mississippi commingle.

Tomorrow and Friday will be more work on that home, and our goal is to leave it nicely bleached and fully torn apart when we leave.

NO Day 2

Hi!!

I am officially an old, out of shape blob. I hurt on many varying parts of my body from just one day of work. We worked in Beatrice's home. Beatrice lives in Lacombe Bayou, a place that no one would confuse with Maple Grove or Edina. Beatrice is 81 and widowed. The church we're staying at arranged for us to finish up the tear out in her place. She lives a few miles down the road temporarily at her great niece's home.

We spent long hours raking and moving brush. Half the team was inside tearing out drywall and ripping up linoleum and tiling. Beatrice's home is a small 2 bedroom rambler (2 BR, a kitchen and a living room). But, those 4 rooms, plus the bathroom took a long, long time to strip down to 2x4's. Lots of dirty, dusty work.

I learned a few things as we did this. Here's a couple things that I noticed.

First, planning and preparation are very important things in leadership. Jon taught about this in PitStop the other night...and I have a great example of what happens when planning/prep aren't adequate...as we were breaking for lunch, our church contact person came out to check on our progress. He told us casually that we'd need to move what looked like a small pile of drywall to get it closer to the street. "You see, FEMA will come along and will scoop up whatever they can reach from the roadway with their trucks, and that pile isn't close enough." FEMA apparently uses a bunch of trucks with large claws that will swing out to the side and pick up debris. A group that did some tear out a while ago didn't know about the FEMA trucks. So, they moved tore out drywall, and moved it...but the job wasn't adequate. To make the situation worse, they dumped the drywall into a hole created by an uprooted tree. It looked like a 15 minute job. But, no...Scott Olson and I worked like dogs for an hour to rake/shovel/pitchfork that stuff out. It was a lot deeper than we thought and it had disintegrated even more in the last week or two once exposed to the elements. Lesson learned: when you're doing something, make sure yuo do it all the way...otherwise you end up possibly creating more work for you or someone else. Leadership moment for the day, I guess. If those other guys had simply gotten a full picture of what FEMA's needs are, then all that work would have been avoided.

OK, I also had a great spiritual insight, too. As I was trying to strip up tiles in Beatrice's kitchen, I was reminded of a great concept when it comes to evangelism. You see, some of the tiles came up real easy...the pry bar slid under nicely and that tile would pop out nice and clean, all in one piece. Other tiles wuold crack into 2 or 7 pieces when I pried them up. Still others would require a ton of work--scraping, pounding, whatever else. It always helped with the stubborn tiles to come at them from many different angles...then I'd get a little give here and maybe open up a different corner to slide that bar under. Reminded me of how we reach others around us. Some are ready to just pop off, with an easy slide of God's pry bar. Others require a ton of patience and we have to come at them from all angels with God's love and grace. Every tile was different. Every tile eventually came up. I believe that every person that we have around us can be won for God. It requires prayer, patience, and a determination to come at people with God's love from every concievable angle in their lives. And that pry bar...it's a tool. Just like us. We're God's tools that he uses to get at people, to get under them and to move them spiritually. Sometimes it's wonderfully easy, sometimes it takes a ton of time. And it's dirty work!!! In fact, I desperately need a shower right now!! But, it's worth it.

In the midst of a pile of debris, I saw a few flowers popping up. Great to see God's creation, resilient and new, determined to reflect the Creator's glory, even in the midst of ruination.

Oh yeah, we had a flat tire today. Nothing ever quite goes flawlessly, does it???

It was a great day, all in all.

New Orleans Day 1

Flew in today and got here just fine. The rest of the team met me and we spent an hour driving around New Orleans looking at the levees and finding the spots where they were breached. Those levees are pretty huge, and it's amazing to see how tall they are. The force needed to breach them would have had to be almost incomprehensible.

As we drove around, we saw entire neighborhoods that are still abandoned. I never saw a kid playing in New Orleans. Taco Bell is offering a $1000 signing bonus to come and work there; Wendy's will pay and extra $125 per week to work there. The city is still half deserted. Amazing.

Almost every home had the spray painted signs on them. A large "x" is painted on the front of the home. On the left edge of the "x" goes the identification marking of the search crew who was there, on the right goes the date. Below is the number of dead found in the home. I never saw anything besides a zero on any of those homes, but there certainly were lots of homes that did bear numbers on them.

Tomorrow we will hit the bayou. I hear there's lots of gnats, no-see-ums and snakes. We'll see!!

Christmas present

I went to a Phil Keaggy concert in December. Keaggy is one of the top 5 guitarists in the world. He does incredibly amazing things with his instrument. OK, I've been a lifelong fan of his, but I'm still somewhat objective. He's been in Guitar Player magazine a zillion times and is consistently rated as one of the very best by people who know. Enough said.

In the encore, I yelled out for him to sing a piece he wrote 29 years ago. It's a sonnet by CS Lewis, set to music. Lewis happens to be one of my favorite thinkers and writers, so it's kind of heavenly to have Keaggy playing and singing lyrics written by Brother Jack (Lewis).

I just wanted to share those lyrics with you...incredibly powerful words about our tendency to be so self-centered...

So, here goes:

As the Ruin Falls, by C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I've never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure are the goals I seek.
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin--
I talk of love (A scholar's parrot may talk Greek!)
but, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me--but how late!!--my lack.
I see the chasm; and everything You are was making
my heart into a bridge by which I might get back
from exile and grown man; and now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you are the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.


Wow.

New Year

Hey, it's a new year...wow. I haven't blogged for a long time. It kinda helps to remember your password after 5 months of inactivity. I've tried to get back on but couldn't!!! Finally it all came back to me. So, I'll blog more in the coming weeks.

I'm going down to New Orleans in a couple weeks to do a week of work for Katrina relief. Looking forward to that!! I'm planning on blogging while down there...so, check it out.