Sunday, February 18, 2007

Salt and Light

You know, WATS Day is coming up at the end of April. I read this article and it made me think of WATS Day. How willing are we to get into someone else's life? Would we (I) want to be this ladies friend? Or even just someone who comes over and helps her clean? What about taking responsibility for her car? Just one of them?

I don't know what I would do. This story made me want to go over there with trash bags, rubber gloves, and a few other people to at least make the trash go away. She lives faraway from here but there have to be people like this in Abilene. I think of Jim's grandaddy that had newspapers stacked up at the door. How easy it would have been to haul them off. Then there was Tammy's grandmother, whose house I had the privilege of helping to clean.

This morning Phil talked again about us being salt and light (Matthew 5:13-14) Oh, don't we want to be salt! Don't we want to get out of our comfort zones and change our world! Don't we want to shed some light in the dark! Don't we want to be more than just church-goers!

Father, we pray that You make us salt in a tasteless, Godless world. We ask you to make our hearts see the lost as your children looking for Home. May we this week be a light in the darkness of sin. Lead us to teach our children to be light, too. Forgive our past of looking to just ourselves and our own little world. Let us see those around us as you see them.

5 comments:

Tammy M. said...

Amen!

Anonymous said...

Wow, what an article. I could not imagine living like that. The police & city officials seemed to be so considerate of her well being, which is something you don't see often. They truly seemed to care for that poor lady. There are people just like her all over our town too, so many areas that we can all be helping in. I loved Phil's sermon Sunday too..but then, I always do. =)

Lisa said...

It really makes me sad. What caused her to be so overwhelmed by life that she couldn't get up and throw away a bag of trash?

Hurts my heart to think about how much she must have been struggling through the years.

Anonymous said...

You have to realize that the majority of people like that suffer from mental illness and are unable to do any better. My best friend is a psychologist with the VA Hospital in Memphis (she and her husband were both psychologists for the VA in New Orleans, but Katrina wiped out the hospital and made it mandatory that they not come back) where she works with veterans who are either homeless or mentally ill (many with post-traumetic stress disorder - PTSD) to one extent or another.

For people like that, no amount of help can really help until they get proper psychological treatment and therapy. They need to be brought to treatment for their illnesses as obviously they are not "normal."

Just wanted to interject a little different thought on the subject. We should feel sorry for them and try to help them, yes. But we must do much more and get them into a treatment program if we can get them to go, which is another problem on top of the symptoms.

Sarah said...

Ya know, I've been thinking on this for two days, so here I go agreeing w/ Dee... :-)

Yeah, there's a problem there -- and it's not the clutter. The police have removed the clutter -- which, as anna says, is rare and AWESOME -- but it doesn't "just return". This lady needs HELP, and it's a lot more than clutter removal. That said, there is an opportunity to be salt and light to those-type people, as well!