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Lenten Devotional Series

With a Little Help from My Friends

by Todd Coe


In life and death, in life beyond death, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God.
-St. Pauls UCC Statement of Faith

I hope this won’t sound boastful, but I have a lot of experience in helping.  I’ve done home repairs on the Louisiana bayou on an alternative spring break trip during college, cooked meals for the Lincoln Park Community Shelter, boxed up food at the Greater Chicago Food Depository, and looked in on ill and injured neighbors.  I’ve helped…and I thought I’d gotten pretty good at it.  As it turns out, I had no idea what I was doing at all.

Last summer, our garden-level condo flooded during a rainstorm.  Not only did we have no place to live, but we had to either box up or throw out everything we owned as soon as possible.  Suddenly, we were on the other side of the equation.  For the first time I can remember, WE were the ones in need.  In the days that followed, we saw a seemingly endless parade of friends and neighbors show up at our door.  Some were good friends who I knew we could count on, but to my amazement, some were folks I had only met a handful of times.  One such person came in on our second day of packing and simply said, “I heard you needed help, so I came.  Tell me what I can do.”  At that moment, I realized what awesome power there is in the simple act of extending one’s hand to someone in need.

The power of helping lies not in its ability to make us feel slightly less guilty about living a privileged life, nor even in the warm feeling of self-satisfaction we get when we see gratitude in the eyes of those we help.  The true power of helping comes from the simple fact that when we extend our hand to our neighbor, we extend to them nothing less than the eternal, perfect love of God.  In helping our neighbor, we become a reminder to them that God exists and that they are never alone. 

Breanna and I have had many trials and setbacks since that flood, but we’ve fallen back on the knowledge that we don’t have to conquer them alone.  We think back to all those people who gave up a busy summer weekend to pack boxes and put them on a truck.  We think of those who gave us a place to stay, whether just for a night or for much longer than we had any right to expect.  We think of all those people who became living, breathing manifestations of God’s love right here in this city and know that we are never, ever alone.  Thanks be to God.
 
 
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