Winter.
We got our first significant snowfall on Wednesday afternoon. Just enough to make everything look different the next morning and enough to make you start remembering how to drive. I went to the Food Bank with a couple of friends and skidded 3 times.
We were a bit cold at Dinner, but we think it was because the heaters blew a fuse and CL had a hard time figuring out which breaker it was. The fuse panel is down a hall where the lights have gone and it makes it difficult to read the fading notes written on the chart so she had to go down the hall, throw a breaker, go back into the room, turn on a radiator, hold her hand over it, wait to see whether it heated up, then if not, repeat the process several times.
Which illustrates something I've observed over the last few years. When you're poor, nothing is simple. You can't just do something because you've decided to do it. There are always complications - mostly about getting supplies, transportation or making broken things work. You get to be fairly brilliant at fixing things, or improvising, or substituting because it's a survival skill.
There aren't a lot of books out there with titles like, "How To Cook Christmas Dinner For Six In a Toaster Oven". So you problem-solve.
And there's not much you can't make work, if you put your heads together. Which leaves you with a real sense of accomplishment and self-sufficiency. But it's tiring. It takes a constant flow of energy, mental and physical, to find and cobble together the bits that you need to get the van on the road or the stove to work or the roof to stop leaking. It takes hours and hours of time.
People with no jobs, at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, work harder than anybody I know, because they work all the time. Constantly. Scanning for resources, making phone calls, walking somewhere, walking back, fixing this, mending that. It's exhausting.
I read a post the other day about a guy who spent a night sleeping on the streets of a big city to see what it was like, but I really don't think one night can give you the picture. I don't think that I, after nearly 3 years of friendship with the people who live at the Motel, really understand the life of someone who's poor.
This morning, we're working on shrinkwrapping windows. (Explanation follows.)
The rooms at the Motel are somewhat winterized. There's some insulation and there are electric baseboard heaters in every room. Baseboard heaters are notoriously inefficient. And, for some reason, they're almost always located directly under a window. The windows are old and provide no insulation at all and most of them leak around the frame or through the cracked glass.
So somebody invented window shrinkwrap. Large sheets of transparent plastic that you apply to the window frame with double-sided sticky tape. Once they're in place you shrink the plastic using a blow dryer to eliminate wrinkles and flapping in the wind. It can make a big difference by creating an air pocket and stopping drafts.
So that's today. BH and S and AF are going around with a list of names and room numbers to see what they can do for the folks who signed up.
I'm going to go... um... Figurehead. Yeah.
E is making lunch and coffee (the Food Bank had a big box of cabbages on Wednesday night and she grabbed a couple. We're having cabbage rolls, I think. I hope.) and we'll see what happens.
Sometimes I find myself writing things like "We're going to shrinkwrap windows at the Motel" and looking in those words for a spiritual parallel or a moral or a basis for a devotional. This time I'm striking out. I just don't see the sermon illustration value of this, or for that matter, most of what we do.
I can't tell that story and say, "Jesus is the shrinkwrap and the windows are sin and the base board heater is the Holy Spirit."
'Cause it's just windows. Being cold or warm. Getting help or not getting help. Shivering or not shivering. Being loved or not being loved. Loving or not loving.
As we said right at the beginning, "No sermons, no strings attached."
Sermons are easier.
r
We got our first significant snowfall on Wednesday afternoon. Just enough to make everything look different the next morning and enough to make you start remembering how to drive. I went to the Food Bank with a couple of friends and skidded 3 times.
We were a bit cold at Dinner, but we think it was because the heaters blew a fuse and CL had a hard time figuring out which breaker it was. The fuse panel is down a hall where the lights have gone and it makes it difficult to read the fading notes written on the chart so she had to go down the hall, throw a breaker, go back into the room, turn on a radiator, hold her hand over it, wait to see whether it heated up, then if not, repeat the process several times.
Which illustrates something I've observed over the last few years. When you're poor, nothing is simple. You can't just do something because you've decided to do it. There are always complications - mostly about getting supplies, transportation or making broken things work. You get to be fairly brilliant at fixing things, or improvising, or substituting because it's a survival skill.
There aren't a lot of books out there with titles like, "How To Cook Christmas Dinner For Six In a Toaster Oven". So you problem-solve.
And there's not much you can't make work, if you put your heads together. Which leaves you with a real sense of accomplishment and self-sufficiency. But it's tiring. It takes a constant flow of energy, mental and physical, to find and cobble together the bits that you need to get the van on the road or the stove to work or the roof to stop leaking. It takes hours and hours of time.
People with no jobs, at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, work harder than anybody I know, because they work all the time. Constantly. Scanning for resources, making phone calls, walking somewhere, walking back, fixing this, mending that. It's exhausting.
I read a post the other day about a guy who spent a night sleeping on the streets of a big city to see what it was like, but I really don't think one night can give you the picture. I don't think that I, after nearly 3 years of friendship with the people who live at the Motel, really understand the life of someone who's poor.
This morning, we're working on shrinkwrapping windows. (Explanation follows.)
The rooms at the Motel are somewhat winterized. There's some insulation and there are electric baseboard heaters in every room. Baseboard heaters are notoriously inefficient. And, for some reason, they're almost always located directly under a window. The windows are old and provide no insulation at all and most of them leak around the frame or through the cracked glass.
So somebody invented window shrinkwrap. Large sheets of transparent plastic that you apply to the window frame with double-sided sticky tape. Once they're in place you shrink the plastic using a blow dryer to eliminate wrinkles and flapping in the wind. It can make a big difference by creating an air pocket and stopping drafts.
So that's today. BH and S and AF are going around with a list of names and room numbers to see what they can do for the folks who signed up.
I'm going to go... um... Figurehead. Yeah.
E is making lunch and coffee (the Food Bank had a big box of cabbages on Wednesday night and she grabbed a couple. We're having cabbage rolls, I think. I hope.) and we'll see what happens.
Sometimes I find myself writing things like "We're going to shrinkwrap windows at the Motel" and looking in those words for a spiritual parallel or a moral or a basis for a devotional. This time I'm striking out. I just don't see the sermon illustration value of this, or for that matter, most of what we do.
I can't tell that story and say, "Jesus is the shrinkwrap and the windows are sin and the base board heater is the Holy Spirit."
'Cause it's just windows. Being cold or warm. Getting help or not getting help. Shivering or not shivering. Being loved or not being loved. Loving or not loving.
As we said right at the beginning, "No sermons, no strings attached."
Sermons are easier.
r
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