A Call to The Trenches of Texas

The left says: Who cares about The Nashville Statement when there’s devastation in Texas? What awful timing!

The right says: Who cares about Melania’s shoes when there’s devastation in Texas? What awful timing!

I say: Who cares? The ones sending help or being a help to the victims, regardless of age, social status, race, or sexual orientation. The ones praying. The ones devastated in heart at the sight of fellow countrywomen and countrymen who are devastated in body. In mind. In spirit.

That’s who cares.

There’s a wrong and right way to be concerned about our neighbor. One type of concern points the finger. It attempts to get a speck out of someone else’s eye, when we have a log sticking out of ours. The other type of concern leads to action, such as through a whispered prayer or a written check or a trip to offer hands on help.

True neighbors, and dare I say true Americans, pull together in adversity. Sounds to me like Texas is doing a fine job of pulling together and caring for their own. There are stories out there of non-Texans also helping. Those who can’t help physically are expressing their concern, condolences, and prayers. But there are always those who have poor timing and/or say dumb things. And unfortunately, these are the ones who make it into the news.

Still, we have a choice as to where we focus our time and energy. And at this juncture, I hope and pray we focus on our fellow Americans who are hurting, rather than news stories meant to stir the pot of hatred, malice, and contempt.

Love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. It helps me to use my imagination when devastation occurs in the lives of my neighbors. I imagine water up to my chest in my living room. My computer is ruined. My pictures that I cherish almost more than life itself are ruined. Most everything, whether I am attached to it or not, is ruined. My dog drowned. Maybe I am dead, but my small child is clinging to my dead body for dear life. My neighbor is desperate for medical care, and there’s no way of getting her to the hospital. I’m about to deliver a baby, and have no idea how I will make it to the hospital. I’m living in a shelter with hundreds of strangers, fearful of getting mugged, unable to sleep in a room full of moldy stench and despair and lack of drinking water.

Picturing the devastation helps me be appropriately devastated. It helps me weep with those who weep, which then leads me to do what I can to help.

Perhaps we should all try a thing called attempting to walk in another man’s moccasins, instead of knocking another man’s sins – or said more accurately, knocking what we feel are his sins.

I’m so proud of Texas and how they’re pulling together. But those who are on the sidelines, judging in the most ridiculous ways ever, need to get a grip on reality, which is that real people are greatly suffering, and probably haven’t given one single thought to what Melania is wearing, or whether a board of Christian leaders came out with a statement on human sexuality.

Those things are the farthest from any true victim’s mind … and that fact says more and speaks louder than anything I can say in a blog that was written in a harried, hurry-scurry way on the subject of suffering at the “hands” of Hurricane Harvey.

Those who are truly victimized are not watching those who are not truly victimized. They’re too swamped with their own troubles to even consider the gripes of those living in Namby Pamby Land who are overly concerned about high heels. Or those merely being inconsiderate with the timing of making a statement that has nothing to do with their current, overwhelming, life-altering suffering.

There’s no excuse for being inconsiderate and besides the point. And this blog is merely a call for those healthy and dry and comfortable to stop plucking each other to death while their fellow Americans are literally -or coming entirely too close – to drowning.

Can we all do that? Or have some reached such a depth of depravity that they can no longer see past their petty preferences and even their deeply held beliefs long enough to rescue the perishing?

It’s not the time to be on the right or the left. It’s time to be in the ditch. In the trenches, bailing out dirty water, and giving cold cups of water in the name of Jesus.

Whether by physical might, financial might, or spiritual might in the form of prayer … please, let’s put away all malice and love our Texan neighbors.