Blood-colored rust covered the tin roof, and flakes of white paint peeled off to reveal rotten wood siding.
My heart twisted at the sight of the home.
It was the sixth week of my work with Appalachian Outreach, a poverty relief organization in the mountains of East Tennessee, and I was spent. While my fellow missionary David parked the truck, I glanced again over the list of projects for this home that week and sighed. The list was lengthy.
We were to replace the tin roof, convert a porch into a bedroom, hang T1-11 siding on two sides of the house, replace the exterior doors, completely rewire the home, and paint. I sighed once more.
Then she walked out.
Loud, brash and spunky, Wanda Smith is not someone that I will soon forget. Her skin shone with perspiration and several inches of cleavage peeked out of her tank top. I blinked in shock when I realized that yes, that really was a dollar bill in there. Only slightly quieter than Wanda was the incessant yipping of her three tiny dogs, which ran in and out of the house with reckless abandon.
Mrs. Wanda was so grateful and thrilled that we were there and grabbed us by the arms to take us inside her home.
Walking in, we took note of the state of the kitchen floor. Yellowed in some areas and torn in others, the linoleum was in poor shape. Our project list didn’t include any interior work, however. It was strictly outdoors this time, and even then it was on the verge of being too much.
My heart lurched as we stepped inside the tiny living room. A rail thin woman lay on a hospital bed, propped up on a cluster of pillows. She said little. Mrs. Wanda, however, more than compensated for the woman’s quiet. She chattered on about painting the kitchen recently with donated paint. It was all I could do to take my eyes off of the woman, though. Back home, I had watched my own grandfather get very ill and thin, but I had never seen anyone look like she did.
Chatting all the while, Mrs. Wanda completed her tour and walked us back outside.
“That was Lesa,” she whispered. “She’s got the HIV and only has a few months left.”
Further probing let us know that Lesa was not even blood-kin to her, but a friend that she had taken in because her own family didn’t want her. My heart swelled, and I knew that we just had to somehow make this house into a real home for Mrs. Wanda.
Next time, I’ll finish telling the rest of Mrs. Wanda’s story (the most incredible that I encountered this summer), but I just had to go on and introduce her to you. She is a woman of incredible strength and one that I deeply admire. This same day, the first day that we met her, Mrs. Wanda made a statement that I will never forget. She said that as a teenager she would go, much like we were going, from home to home doing odd jobs for people that needed help but could not afford it. “I never thought I would ever need to be on the receiving end.”
I guess not many people ever really do. Before this summer, I drove by ramshackle houses and trailers without giving thought to the struggling people that sleep within their walls. Even now, I catch myself doing the same thing. It is so easy to become consumed in what I am doing and lose sight of what I could be doing to lend a hand. Whether the idea of raw, painful poverty is foreign to you or not, I encourage you to open your eyes and your heart to the people around you. I believe that the love of Jesus Christ is expressed most poignantly here on earth when we simply take the time to love one another.
"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?"
1 John 3:18
My heart twisted at the sight of the home.
It was the sixth week of my work with Appalachian Outreach, a poverty relief organization in the mountains of East Tennessee, and I was spent. While my fellow missionary David parked the truck, I glanced again over the list of projects for this home that week and sighed. The list was lengthy.
We were to replace the tin roof, convert a porch into a bedroom, hang T1-11 siding on two sides of the house, replace the exterior doors, completely rewire the home, and paint. I sighed once more.
Then she walked out.
Loud, brash and spunky, Wanda Smith is not someone that I will soon forget. Her skin shone with perspiration and several inches of cleavage peeked out of her tank top. I blinked in shock when I realized that yes, that really was a dollar bill in there. Only slightly quieter than Wanda was the incessant yipping of her three tiny dogs, which ran in and out of the house with reckless abandon.
Mrs. Wanda was so grateful and thrilled that we were there and grabbed us by the arms to take us inside her home.
Walking in, we took note of the state of the kitchen floor. Yellowed in some areas and torn in others, the linoleum was in poor shape. Our project list didn’t include any interior work, however. It was strictly outdoors this time, and even then it was on the verge of being too much.
My heart lurched as we stepped inside the tiny living room. A rail thin woman lay on a hospital bed, propped up on a cluster of pillows. She said little. Mrs. Wanda, however, more than compensated for the woman’s quiet. She chattered on about painting the kitchen recently with donated paint. It was all I could do to take my eyes off of the woman, though. Back home, I had watched my own grandfather get very ill and thin, but I had never seen anyone look like she did.
Chatting all the while, Mrs. Wanda completed her tour and walked us back outside.
“That was Lesa,” she whispered. “She’s got the HIV and only has a few months left.”
Further probing let us know that Lesa was not even blood-kin to her, but a friend that she had taken in because her own family didn’t want her. My heart swelled, and I knew that we just had to somehow make this house into a real home for Mrs. Wanda.
Next time, I’ll finish telling the rest of Mrs. Wanda’s story (the most incredible that I encountered this summer), but I just had to go on and introduce her to you. She is a woman of incredible strength and one that I deeply admire. This same day, the first day that we met her, Mrs. Wanda made a statement that I will never forget. She said that as a teenager she would go, much like we were going, from home to home doing odd jobs for people that needed help but could not afford it. “I never thought I would ever need to be on the receiving end.”
I guess not many people ever really do. Before this summer, I drove by ramshackle houses and trailers without giving thought to the struggling people that sleep within their walls. Even now, I catch myself doing the same thing. It is so easy to become consumed in what I am doing and lose sight of what I could be doing to lend a hand. Whether the idea of raw, painful poverty is foreign to you or not, I encourage you to open your eyes and your heart to the people around you. I believe that the love of Jesus Christ is expressed most poignantly here on earth when we simply take the time to love one another.
"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?"
1 John 3:18
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