This past week, my son Thomas and I went to Johnson County, Tennessee to help renovate houses through the Appalachia Service Project. It was a good 7 and a half hour drive into beautiful, though poverty-stricken country, with 65 of our closest friends through church. I was privileged to be on a team with several members of Thomas’ High School Cross Country team. Great bunch of kids. We even went running together on Sunday night, before the exhaustion set in.
Finally home. These jeans are STILL dirty.
The job we were given was to shore up the support underneath a mobile home that was beginning to slump. The job involved crawling under the house and digging 8 holes, each 22 by 22 inches wide and 26 inches deep, and then setting up concrete footers, setting cinderblock piers and setting everything with concrete.
When it came to the digging, luckily, we didn’t run into the ridiculously rocky soil we encountered in last year’s trip to Buchanan County Virginia. But our celebration was short lived, as this soil was pure clay – still extremely hard to dig in. Worse, in some places we had an overhead of 18-22 inches in which to dig (remember, we’re under a trailer home, here), much too short to accommodate anything so grand as a shovel. So, the job involved digging with the back claws of hammers, and pulling the dirt out of the holes with our hands. It looked very much like 7 people trying to dig out of jail.
Not much headroom
It was long, hot, dirty work. In addition to the fact that it rained every day at 3 or 4 o’clock, there were several leaks in the home, some from the washing machine, some from the sewage pipes under the house, some from the bathroom. You get the idea. The lot was very muddy, smelly, and permanently wet. We all got muddier and filthier on this trip than I think any of us have ever been, but of course the reason we were there was to help the family in that home, and they were very appreciative of any help we could give them, which is gratifying. After a week of digging footers, moving cinderblocks and cutting rebar, we were exhausted, but at least felt we’d done some good in the world.
The A-Team (right to left - Thomas, Kyle, Marty, Tim, Og, Austin, Mike)
On the last day we were there, I was as covered in mud and filth as I had been the rest of the week. As we set the last support and drove the last spike, I ripped a hole in the knee of my jeans. Later, we went out to lunch at a local Bar-B-Cue place to celebrate the completion of our work (an outdoor place, thank you, so the other patrons wouldn’t have to smell us).
So we stood there, muddy men waiting for our food, me with a hole in my muddy jeans. As we waited, I saw a guy walking down the street. He was filthy, with a hole in the knee of his jeans.
I don’t know what his story was, but I knew what I had been through to make me look the way I did, and he looked pretty much the same as me. He probably still looks that way, though I’m now 8 hours away and finally clean after a much needed shower.
My heart goes out to that man. Images of God we are.
A friend of mine and I were talking about story structure, character and conflict earlier today (yes, we actually talk about stuff like that. Move on.)
