When the Homily is about Immunology

Hard lessons about despair and community

My life's problems fail to compare to the problems that others face in the world, in fact they don't amount to a hill of beans. But non-the-less, sometimes they can still creep up on you and cause you to give in to the sin of despondency. This was almost certainly the case for me.

I have about half a dozen major projects awaiting my attention here at our new home and yet for the last two weekends I have had MAJOR problems arise which required my immediate and heavily unqualified attention. First a main line water leak reared its ugly head, followed by the discovery of a heavily rotted bathroom floor threatening to collapse. Inherent and within all major problems such as these, are a host of smaller problems intended to complicate the overall picture to the point of complete insanity. They seem to pile up upon one another and I left spiraling with the question: How am I going to ever have the time to fix all of this???

Interstingly enough, on saturday morning while reading Beginning to Pray Met. ANTHONY Bloom provided to me what he termed a very "Russian" answer:

If you do not die first, you will have time to do it. If you die before it is done, you don't need to do it...do not worry about death, When death is there, you are no longer there, but as long as you are there, death is not.

Regardless, in facing the prospect of both repairs, I found myself overwhelmed with "handyman" ignorance and the knowledge that I was too poverty stricken (yeah right) to hire someone less ignorant that me to do the work. But in both cases, I found myself delivered from my despondency by friends. Friends who came with shovels, gloves, and positive attitudes – some came by complete surprise. The jobs went (or are going) well, and as I knelt down before my wife last night to rest and apologize for my despondency, she simply laid my head on her lap and spoke the words of God to me:

You are learning the importance of community, and reliance on others.

I’m also learning humility in the process.