The last straw

It was 4:05 am on a Monday morning and although I had gotten out of bed and showered I was barely awake. I had just wrapped myself in my white terry bath robe when the door bell rang. I shook my head in disbelief but hadn’t even made it to the hall when it rang again. (I’m beginning to dislike the piece of music played by my front door bell.)

I walked to the door and realized I didn’t have the porch light on, but even before I made a full reconnaissance I heard the coughing. It was my neighbor, who had left the hospital against medical advice a few weeks before. 

“Could I have some coffee?” she asked when I opened the door. “I saw through the window that you were up.”

Now I do have a soft spot in my heart for people who want coffee, so I usually give her some grounds in a Ziploc bag. This hour of the morning was pushing my generosity a little, but I doggedly walked to the kitchen. 

The only coffee I had ground was decaf, so I poured some into a bag and handed it to her. 

“It’s decaf,” I said.

“Sorry to bother you at this time,” she said. “Why were you up, couldn’t you sleep? Oh it’s decaf? I guess I’ll just go to McDonalds then.”

“No, I’m going to work,” I wanted to shout after her. 

Just the night before I had been lamenting to my friends that for the first time I was weary of living in a diverse neighborhood. There was the stolen lawn mower, the person who didn’t meet payment deadlines, the children demanding ice cream. There was the ruined window screen on my mini barn…

and finally the graffiti on the back (cover your eyes if you don’t want to see it), as follows:

I had let some rowdy children play in the barn while it was empty. Afterwards I found a hair bow in the grass.

I didn’t mind letting them play in it; it was like an enormous play house to them.

But when I got it ready for storage I told them no. Maybe they were angry at me and tore the screen and wrote the words but it seems that the words are too high for a child to write. 

Anyway the 4am request for coffee felt like the last straw. 

That wasn’t it for the day.

On my walk home from work that same evening, a tall, nice-looking man in a long unwashed T-shirt came toward me on the sidewalk above the river. He had an air of frustration and desperation and began talking to me long before we met. 

“Can you help me?” He asked. 

I waited for the story about why he needed seven dollars. 

“I’m lost. I’m so frustrated, I’ve been wandering around all day. Can you tell me how to get to Main Street?”

“It’s the river,” I said. “It’s easy to get lost because of the river.”

I can totally imagine how it would be possible to look for Main Street Elkhart and wander in circles for hours. 

And of course, we were standing on its banks not far from the hospital so I had to deliberate a bit as to whether he should go back to Lexington or on to Franklin. He was going to Faith Mission he said, so I pointed him on south past the hospital and told him to take two lefts. 

He was walking away when he asked me something I don’t think I’ve ever been asked before. 

“You don’t have a cigarette do you?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, and I really felt sorry for him, not so much that he didn’t have one but that he had trained himself to need one. 

I kept walking. 

Remember my turtle on the rock in the river? And how it reminds me that God is always there, even when we can’t see him?

As I walked home, I was basically in tears, overwhelmed with all the needy people in the world and my own exhaustion, inadequacy, the feeling of being burned out. I said a brief prayer for the man I had met but it seemed so inadequate. 

I came around the bend, and as I passed that spot in the river, I turned to see if my lone friend the turtle was there sunning himself. I had not checked for the last few days. 

The little spot was covered with turtles. A big one. Multiple small ones, their heads reflecting in the water. 

I know they are just turtles, but because of the way the lone turtle blessed me before, seeing it with its community of turtles blessed me even more now.  I thought of Elijah, in his state of depression at being alone in Israel, and God saying, actually there are still 7,000 people left. 

The turtles were a reminder that, not only is God there when I can’t see him, but so are His children, the church, a powerful force around me. I am not alone with the needs of the world. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the prophets lately especially Isaiah… He writes such beautiful words. But I wonder, did he ever get discouraged? He got in trouble when people got mad at him for speaking the truth. Or take Noah. He worked for all those years persuading the people to join him on the ark, and no one ever did. He saved himself and his family, but none of the rest. 

So why did God ask them to care? Why did God ask Elijah or Isaiah or Noah to reach out to these people who rarely responded? Why not just live a safe life inside the four walls of your own house and ignore everyone else?

I prayed this question later that evening as I sat on my couch at home. Why God did you ask them to care about those people? Why?

The answer was centuries old and as soft as a drop of rain on my face, which was thrown upturned against the back of the couch in exhaustion. 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son….”

Why love?

Because God did, most remarkably through Jesus. God loved, knowing many people would not love back. That’s why Isaiah did too. And Elijah and Noah. That’s why they suffered the pain of going against the culture they lived in. Because God had called them to be reflections of Himself. 

And I suspect they didn’t always know why either, but more than they cared about why things happened, they cared about Who was with them.

“And lo, I am with you always….”