Easy

Recently, we decided to update our kitchen on third floor. Where we live, each floor in our building has one kitchen shared by the families who live on the floor. Our meals are provided on the first floor, but if your kids won’t eat what’s being served downstairs, or you have a hankering for some molasses cookies, you can go make food in your floor’s kitchen. Some people say that the kitchen is the heart of the home. Well, the third floor kitchen was like the heart of a person about to die of a heart attack. Something needed to be done. We held a floor meeting to get everyone’s input and hopefully everyone’s help on the renovation. The meeting did not go well. Getting fourteen families to agree on things like counter space, refrigerator size, and wall color is quite an undertaking. Just getting everyone to agree on what “clean” means was impossible. There were some hurt feelings, and things got heated. By the end of the meeting, no one wanted any part in getting the kitchen redone. There was a collective throwing up of hands and a general spirit of giving up. But I cook in that kitchen often. And I realized, on looking around, that no one was going to take over and get it done. My options were to cook in a terrible kitchen for many more years, or take over and get it fixed up. This is how people like me wind up in charge of something - backed into a corner.

On looking at the situation, I could see what needed to be done, and I knew a basic order of business. First, rip everything out. Then, put in a new floor, etc. But everything was going to cost money, and we are very tight on money always. So, I talked to the person in charge of our finances to see if we could get money each week to get the kitchen done, and I talked to the people on our floor with carpentry and tile laying skills. Everything seemed to be possible. My deadline was Thanksgiving.

There were some bumps, and some hiccups, and some things that didn’t go as quickly as planned, but I held onto that Thanksgiving deadline. Weeks passed. Then came Thanksgiving, and we were not done. The people who had promised to shop for some of the major items we needed got too busy to pursue it, and finances promised on Monday and Tuesday evaporated on Wednesday. This did not make me happy. This in fact, made me really mad. I knew that the financial problems were not the fault of the person in charge of the money, but I was frustrated that things that I thought were being taken care of were coming back to me undone. So, I told my husband about my feelings. He gently pointed out that the kitchen is a luxury, not a necessity, since we can always eat downstairs, and that if I were not going to spend my life fuming, I would have to accept things as they are and move on. He was very gentle, and very cautious, but this is basically what he said. And this made me realize that I hold the basic assumption that if you are doing the right things for the right reasons, it will all be easy.

If someone had asked me if I believed that, I would have said no, but really, I just kept thinking to myself, “Shouldn’t this be easier?”

My husband works at a homeless shelter. They house over four hundred people a night. There are moms and kids, newborn babies, dads and single people. The shelter never has enough money. They are under constant threat of having the heat/water/lights cut off, and every penny is counted and stretched. My husband does the counting and stretching, as well as convincing the workers sent to cut off the heat/water/lights to give us a little more time to pay the bills. (The joke I tell about the shelter bookkeepers is this: “How many bookkeepers does it take to count to zero? Seven- one to count and the other six to tell people to stop freaking out about it.”) There are days Andrew comes home too exhausted from dealing with the finances over there to do much more than sit on the couch and stare at nothing. And often I think, “Shouldn’t it be easier than this? We are helping homeless people so they don’t freeze to death outside. Shouldn’t it be easier?”

This past Sunday, the guy in charge of the finances did the sermon (he’s one of the pastors). He preached on peace and spoke about Mary, Elizabeth, and Hannah. All of these women had what you might call miracle babies. And I kept thinking about Mary especially. Shouldn’t it have been a little easier for her? Most of the people she knew thought she was sleeping around even though she wasn’t, she had to travel on a donkey in her last trimester for days on end, and she delivered her baby in a barn. Shouldn’t it have been easier for the mother of God’s Son? But maybe, just maybe, there is more to being blessed than being comfortable.

There is a Veggie Tales my kids used to watch which was a spoof of the Lord of the Rings. In it, the Gollum character has a magic ring which guarantees a “Life of Ease.” The ring is a huge temptation for him and everyone in the show.

And it is a huge temptation for me too. It would have been easier to leave the kitchen alone. It would be easier for my husband not to run the finances at the shelter. Life may have been much easier for Mary not to say yes to the angel when he asked her about having God’s Son. But this is why the Bible calls us blessed, because it is possible to have peace and joy even though things are not easy.

So the short answer to “Shouldn’t this be easier?” is a big “Nope!”