Them boys came to work
Sometimes, weekend plans can be completely scrapped due to unexpected events, especially when you are a homeowner. You cannot predict when most appliances will need repair, or when a piece of furniture breaks, or when you’ll find a water leak in the yard…it just comes with the territory of owning/managing property. This past week for me – it was a tree that suddenly collapsed in our yard.
This past Thursday, we had a soaking rain with lightly gusting winds. However, the weather wasn’t the cause of the damage so much as it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or that broke the massive tree limb, anyway.
Bradford Pear trees are a non-native species to North Carolina that property developers loved to plant in the 90s and early 2000s due to their rapid growth and pretty spring flowering. However, they have many drawbacks – their aggressive growth can be invasive, with sprawling root structures that outcompete native trees for resources. Their pretty white flowers also stink – like dead fish. Lastly, and most consequential to my weekend plans, their branches are often weakly attached to the trunk.
So, during a typical NC rainstorm last Thursday, one of the massive limbs on our Bradford Pear broke off and dropped into our front yard. Thankfully, it didn’t land on the house or in the street. However, the crashing limb so severely ripped the trunk that there was no saving the tree. I snapped a picture and sent it to our church’s men’s group chat, lamenting that I suddenly had new plans for the weekend. These are the guys that meet weekly on Zoom to go through the Scriptures, sometimes a book, or we take the time to check in on each other. The group has been rolling for years and it’s always good when we can catch a lunch together or find another way to hang out, outside of saying hello on Sundays.
Since we live in the county and not in a city, the debris removal was totally on me. Immediately, guys were offering chainsaws and assistance. From Friday evening to Saturday evening, multiple guys showed up in waves to help, with a couple of them bringing an extra family member to assist. With chainsaws and a pole saw, we lopped off several still-attached branches, took down the tree, and cut it up. We were able to haul the debris off to one guy’s nearby burn pile.
Left to myself, on my own time and with just my own effort, a tree that size would have taken me two weeks to take down and likely another two weeks of shuttling everything in my truck to the local compost facility. Or, at least, I’d have to pay someone two grand to come do it all for me.
Instead, with about 6 hours of work over a 26-hour time period, 5 guys from the men’s group (plus 2 of their family members)…everything was done. Them boys came to work. And my neighbors noticed.
Here’s a few quotes from some of the guys in the neighborhood, at different points of the process:
Neighbor 1 (while work was on-going): “Are these guys from your church group?”
Me: “Yeah”
Neighbor 1: “That’s pretty cool.”
Me: (everything hauled away, I’m raking the last of the leaves) “I had some good friends come help me out.”
Neighbor 2: “I hope that if I’m ever in a similar situation, I can pull off what you did to get some help.”
Me: (after everything was done, during a dog walk) “Yeah, my men’s group from church jumped in to help me.”
Neighbor 3: (rubbing his chin) “Huh. How about that?”
I’m pretty sure none of these men have believed in Jesus for eternal life. But because of my tree-wrecked weekend plans, they all had front-row seats to the kind of community God made us for. What they saw was a live-action application of one of Jesus’ teachings in His famous Sermon on the Mount:
Matthew 5:14-16
You are the light of the world. A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
My neighborhood saw our light shine, and I was able to tell many of them where that light was coming from. My undesired inconvenience became my opportunity to talk about God. I think we all could use a perspective like that when our plans are interrupted.
Keep Pressing,
Ken