Embracing Community Through Adversity: Lessons from a Hurricane Relief Effort

Discover the profound joy of serving others and building community in this heartwarming episode.

Join us as we delve into a powerful story from South Florida, where a group of young single adults come together to help their community recover from devastating hurricanes. Through service work and shared experiences, they find deeper connections and personal growth beyond the walls of their church. Inspired by C.S. Lewis' thought-provoking quote on love and suffering, our host reflects on how adversity can drive us to meaningful action.

Key Takeaways:
- The transformative power of community service in times of crisis.
- How shared struggles foster stronger bonds than years spent side-by-side.
- Embracing vulnerability to reach out for genuine human connection.

Tune in for an inspiring journey that challenges you to step outside your comfort zone and discover true joy through selfless acts.

Good morning. I hope this podcast finds you well. I've been thinking of a quote by CS Lewis as it relates to, some of the stuff we're going through here right here in our community in South Florida. So as I do this podcast, it's early Sunday morning, And yesterday, a group of us from our church got together and went and provided service work. I work with, what's called young single adults.

These are unmarried 20 to 30 year olds, 30, 35. And we just go volunteer our our service to try to help those who can't clean up after the recent hurricanes that we've had here. And it's just amazing to see. And, actually, I had a couple of young ladies reach out to me from Atlanta, Georgia. So we're down in South Florida, and they texted and said, hey.

Are you doing any service work? Is there any way, we can join you guys? It's just stunning to me. And they came and worked with us yesterday. We had 6 hours of solid work helping a 75 year old man and his property, had tons of trees fall over, and he just was not capable of cleaning up.

And we were able to do an amazing amount of work yesterday, and these young people just were absolutely amazing. Here's a quote from C. S. Lewis. He says, are you sure God wants us to be happy?

I think he wants us to love and be loved, But, we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy, and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering. I'm just telling you firsthand, that's what I saw yesterday, and I've gone through the same thing. Going through a hurricane, and the eye of the hurricane coming right over our home, it's stressful. You're really wondering if your home's gonna be taken.

Mother nature is extremely powerful, and we're all on borrowed time as we reflect on our lives. And and I know the amount of work that is involved in going out and helping other people. I'm in really good shape for a 66 year old guy, and my wife is in amazing shape, so we're able to go out and participate. But it's hard, It's hard work. Cutting down trees and then picking up logs and dragging branches for 100 of yards out to the street, bending over, picking things up, it's like there's not many people that can do that for a good amount of time, and it's hard on the body.

And it's not only hard on the body, they're stress related. Everyone that I'm associated with here, there are teeny teeny little remnants of light PTSD just just going through an experience like that, and then we're seeing the images on TV of those in North Carolina, and my heart goes out to to those. It was just unprecedented that what happened, and what's happening with mother nature around the world. But I don't know. Perhaps God is trying to teach us something.

But I'm telling you as I as I'm thinking I'm telling you the experience that I had yesterday. So leading up to it, I knew our our church community was gonna gather together and go provide service. It's it's very organized, well I call it organized chaos, but you know there's so many moving parts. But anyway, I wasn't the happiest of campers. I'm extremely busy.

I love working with my clients throughout the week, dealing with heavy, heavy issues. And then and that takes a toll on me because I put myself out there, but I'm like, now I gotta go out and serve on Saturday Sunday. I don't really wanna do that. I'm tired. But let me tell you something that happened yesterday.

I got myself up because I'm thinking in my mind, is there any way I can get out of this? And they go, nope. I can't really get out of it because I'm kind of in charge of this group. It's like, not really. Right?

So it's like, and my wife, she's just I don't know anyone that works harder. She's she's 10 times stronger than I am. She is just amazing. If you were to see her, she never stops. She just keeps going.

Everyone's looking at her, even guys that are in their twenties thirties. Why doesn't she ever slow down? Yeah, she just doesn't slow down. She never complains, she just goes to work. But I'm telling you what happened yesterday, I don't know, I just had a different different level of energy with me.

I feel great this morning even though I physically did so much yesterday, I feel fine this morning. It's like my body has been regenerated. And it's like the relationships that we were making with each other. We learn more about each other providing service in 6 hours than we do in in 6 years going to church with each other. Because when you go to church, you know, you put a different face on, and you're listening to the messages, singing the music, which is good.

It's it's it's important, but there's just something different When you just get out, and you just go to work, and you just wrestle, you go right into the middle of the storm, meaning, alright. Let's just where are we going? This is the person who reached out for help. Let's go over and see what they need. You never know what you're gonna get into.

You know, we're mucking out a house, we're cleaning up yards with tree branches and stuff, and so it's a little unsettling because you just never really know if you're capable of doing this stuff. Like there's some things like it's here we need to repair a roof. Well, I don't really know how to repair a roof. I'm not a construction guy, but you just, you know, you just all pull together, and just there's some guys that use chainsaws, and there's some that don't, and then there's some that can pull the leaves. It's just weird.

Anyway, it's just amazing coming together, jumping in, going to work, trusting in the process, but you get outside of yourself. And back to that C. S. Lewis quote, I think it's human suffering that wakes us up. And again, I mentioned in a previous podcast, so I've got a beautiful community that I live in.

Feel extremely blessed. Wonderful neighbors, but we all kind of keep to ourselves. When something like this happens, we no longer keep to ourselves. It forces us. There's something with inside us that that we go out and we connect with other people, and we start to have more meaningful deep conversations.

Why does that need to be so? I just ask you to ponder that. I just don't think we need to wait for these catastrophes to happen in order for us to reach out to other people. Just just be vulnerable. Just risk.

Quit. We need to quit talking negatively to ourselves and making up stories in our minds. We need to move forward with positive intent that our neighbors are good people, and think positively towards them. Think positively towards yourself. And here here on top of it, this little side note, so 3 of our main guys, the hardest working guys, young single adults that were out yesterday working with us in the field, they had a soccer game last night.

They were in a championship soccer game, and I'm going, are you kidding me? And I remember talking to him during the week, you know, yeah, send me when you guys send me the time and the location that I would love to come and watch it. So here I was home. It's like 7 o'clock at night, and they and and I get a text going, oh, remember our game's tonight at 8:20. And it's another 45 minute drive just where I came from, and then and the same thought hit me.

It's like, man. No. I'm too tired. And then I got and then I said to myself, you know what? They're reaching out to you to go support them.

You know, when you're when you're playing, you want someone to clap for you? You want someone to watch you? To be there? And so I went to their game last night, and it was just an amazing experience. They lost a championship game, you know, in a shootout soccer game.

But but at the end, we connected, and and you can just tell. They were like, oh, thanks for coming. You were watching. You were watching. You cared about us.

And, yeah, so they so so they worked physical labor so hard yesterday, and then they played a soccer game. They're amazing soccer players. And then they they played a soccer game last night, and then we're getting up again this morning, and we're meeting at the church at 7:30 in the morning, and then we're gonna go out and and serve again today. But there's a certain joy that comes from that. And I don't think it's the word happy.

It's something deeper than happy. It's you're really connecting with other people. You learn who another person is when you're out struggling with them. You're working with them. You're laboring with them.

If you can get out of yourself, get out of your little cave, all of the negative thoughts that we tell ourselves, and we try to keep ourselves safe and protected from the world and not do hard things. I'm just telling you my experience is if you want to experience this thing called pure joy, you have to get outside of yourself. And you gotta dive in, and you just gotta go to work, take your uncomfortable feelings, put one foot in front of the other, and just go do the hard thing. And and then you and then perhaps you'll you'll you'll understand what it is that I'm talking about. Anyway, have an amazing day, and I'm gonna go have another amazing day with my friends doing some hard stuff.