In big letters at the top of our initial work assignment was this plea: Need help ASAP before dozer comes. The request was for a woman named Betty, and she was asking for “as many people as possible” to sort through the rubble of her house by hand, looking for any personal items that may have survived.
Like so much of what we saw in Gulfport, Mississippi, nothing at all had changed for Betty since the storm—even three months later. Her home, like the houses around hers, had been picked up in the storm surge and set down in big twisted pile of debris. Everything she owned was in that pile.
Her hope was to have enough of the wreckage removed—looking through it all the while—to be able to put a FEMA trailer on her site. (She is currently renting a single room in the house of a local family—there are still no local hotel rooms available for miles around.)
But Betty is in her early 60s, and she had no one to help and no resources to pay for the kind of help she needed. So, using chain saws and wire cutters and lots of willing hands, we began removing the rubble that was
her house board by board, piece by piece. Amazingly, under huge piles of wood busted into splinters, we found things such as a pristine piece of pottery in perfect condition.
As with each item of any value that was found, the finder picked up the pottery like it was priceless and carefully carried it to the pile on the woman’s slab, where they set it down. Later the woman and her neighbors would go through the pile and see what was theirs.
As we were going through the rubble, someone found an old sewing machine that had now been sitting in water for three months. It was rusted out. It was hard to see how it could be anything other than junk, but just in case she carefully carried the machine up to the concrete slab.
When the woman who owned the house saw it, her face lit up. “Oh!” she said. “You found it! I know it doesn’t look like much now, and it’s probably not worth anything to anyone else, but that was my mother’s… Thank you!”
It may not have been worth anything to anyone else, but clearly it was worth something to her. For her it was a cause of joy and celebration. For her, in that moment, it was more than enough.
It made me think. I had this line going through my head while I was there: Everything deteriorates. Sometimes that deterioration is quick and dramatic, happening in a moment as when Katrina came crashing ashore. Most the time it is slow and unnoticeable, but everything deteriorates. Believe me, after a day of hard work in Mississippi, I was keenly aware that I am deteriorating.
It made me think that one of the basic tasks of life is that in the midst of all that is deteriorating, we too must sort through the stuff of our lives to find those things of value. To be able to do that, we need to be able to distinguish what we are looking for from the rubble around it, to recognize that which we can hold close and treasure as a source of true and lasting joy.
But I wonder: Have we forgotten what we are looking for? Do we know how to recognize it even when we see it? And is that part of the reason why we have to pile stuff on top of stuff and still feel like we need more, even when we already have more than anybody really needs and most people will ever have?
NOTE: This story was one of three included in a sermon reflecting on our trip which can be found here for those who might be interested: http://stmatthewssterling.org/Home.aspx