LOVE Wichita 2009

We had a bit of a sad experience on Saturday. It was time again for our semi-annual community service day that we do through our church. The City of Wichita provides us with a list of projects to work on. This year, we invited a bunch of other churches around Wichita to join us, and 26 accepted! There were a total of about 3200 volunteers that served our city that day at over 100 different job sites.

Jeff and I were given the opportunity to be team captains again this year. We had a team of about 40 young adults to help us with our project. The city provided us the name and address of a woman who has been in violation of city ordinances for several years. She's a hoarder, and her yard has been accumulating junk for some time. She's been found guilty on several counts, and was about to be put in jail for this, but the judge decided to give her one last chance to clean up the yard, and we were the ones who agreed to take the job. She had a bunch of other things - dead tree, piles of tree limbs scattered around the property, general landscape cleanup - that we were going to help her with as well.

We knew that she was going to have trouble letting all this stuff go, so we and our team spent the month before the project praying for her. We, and several other people at our church and in the city offices, invested a lot of time trying to get her to return phone calls and let us meet with her before the project so we could get to know her and let her get to know us before the big day. She finally invited Jeff and I over to her house a few days before the project to show us around and let us see the work to be done.

When we met with her, we could tell we were in for a difficult task. She had an excuse to keep everything, even the dead leaves and tree limbs. We decided to go ahead and try the project anyway. We didn't want to give up then and just let her go to jail. We kept praying for a little miracle.

On the day of the project, we arrived early, along with a police officer, the neighborhood assistant, and our senior pastor. The city provided a huge dumpster for us to use to throw everything away. Jeff and the other three starting working with the lady right then to try and get her to let us move her junk into the dumpster. I took the rest of our group and got them started working on the dead tree and the other landscaping projects.

About an hour into the morning, we had to stop. The four people who were trying to get the lady to let us start moving the junk out got to a point where she just said, "don't touch my stuff". The police officer decided at that point that we just needed to quit, so we called everyone off the property immediately, lest she decide to try and charge us with theft or trespassing.

We were all quite saddened by the situation. We knew we were her last chance and that the judge would be sending her to prison at her next court date, after which the city would go in and clean everything up themselves, then send her a bill for the cost of doing so. We know she likely won't be able to pay the bill, and may lose her house and property because of that. It's just heartbreaking, because I know we had the people there to help her fix everything that day. Our team was awesome and we would have been able to get everything cleaned up for her in 3 or 4 hours, but we just weren't allowed to do it.

Our pastor used our project as an example in his sermon the next morning. He was talking about how our church's mission statement is "Being and Making Disciples". The text for the day was the section about Jesus at Gethsemane from the gospel of Mark. He pointed out that Jesus was incredibly lonely and anguished during that time, and that putting ourselves out in the world to do what we're called to do can also be incredibly lonely and painful for us when we're rejected.

We don't think our story with this particular lady is over yet. We're not sure what's going to happen, but we're all hoping that we'll be able to come along side her again someday and show her the love of Jesus again, and that she'll be more receptive to it then.

The good news - our entire team moved on to different projects around the city after ours fell apart, and we were able to help get more work done at the other sites than we had hoped to. So, the day wasn't a total failure. We're also very excited that so many other churches across the city wanted to join ours. We're making LOVE Wichita an annual event, and we're looking forward to seeing where God takes our city in the future. :)