Little by Little

I took a giant step over a navy blue bucket of Star Wars figurines and remote controlled cars, tip-toed through the dreaded scattered land field of Legos, tripped over a plastic baseball bat left over from a birthday party a year ago, and finally caught myself on the "ABC" chalkboard wall, where someone decided to draw all over it with a Expo dry erase marker. Playrooms are no joke, y'all. Books everywhere. Superheroes everywhere. Nerf darts everywhere. CRAP EVERYWHERE. Just crap as far as the eye can see.

I walked in, surveyed, exhaled, thought about how much I deserved a treat, calmly exited, closed the door, and walked over to the kitchen island where I began to stress eat my way through a hidden stash of Hershey Kisses I'd saved months ago for a rainy day. Turns out, the playroom gave me anxiety even chocolate couldn't fix.

I don't want to sound like a dramatic version of Mariah Carey, but I literally couldn't deal with the disaster my kids had left in that room. It was awful. It was devastating. It was overwhelming.
And it was definitely, definitely too much for lil ole me: too much for me to handle, too much for me to clean, too much for me to help. I could've spent hours in that place and never even make so much as a teeny, tiny dent.

That's kind of how I feel about Hurricane Harvey. It's just much more. It's much more than I can do, much more than you can do, much more than even J.J. Watt can do.

But it's not much more than God can do. Harvey's aftermath was a surprise to you, and to me, and to the weatherman, but it wasn't a surprise to God. He knew that it was coming. He knew what it would do. And before that storm was ever set in motion, before the winds ever began to swirl and before the rains ever began to fall, He knew exactly what we would need to clean that city up. He knew that we would need gumption, and grit and a will to go and grind and give.

And most of all, He knew that we would need each other. He knew that we would need to allow race, political affiliation, financial differences and social statuses to fall off and give way to us just being raw and real as human beings. He knew that we would need to emerge from our cocoons and just be butterflies again, so we could fly and flourish and get stuff done.

He hasn't called us to do it all, but He has called us to do what we can. He has called us to pick up the Legos on the floor right by our feet. He has called us to help our neighbor pick up the piles of Usborne books and put them back on the shelf where they belong. He has called us to shine where we are, to give what we have, and to be exactly who He's formed us to be from the very beginning.

Because that's how a playroom gets cleaned. That's how a city gets rebuilt: little by little, hand in hand, love with love.