1) Something has occurred to me that seems very strange in a way that I don't think has ever crossed my mind before.
We, as relatively normal, everyday people all have secrets. Not necessarily bad ones, just private stuff we don't talk about. Some keep more to themselves than others, obviously, and depending on who you are or what has been going on in your life, those things can either be silly or serious.
But what I think is weird, is that if you were to decide to tell someone something that you've never mentioned before, especially one of your very closest guarded secrets, they might think you were crazy, or even lying about it because those secrets can also be very weird.
Maybe only my secrets are weird. All I know is that I can never tell anyone else my very secretest of secrets, because I don't think anyone would believe me.
2) I'm wrestling with a situation.
It's pretty well known around where I work that the people who live in the neighborhood don't have very much. A lot of them have come to or called us asking for us to give them money. Our former pastor would occasionally let people come to the church and do work, and pay them minimum wage per hour for what they did, but anytime we gave money out to help people, word would get out and we'd be slammed with people and their sob stories asking us to pay for rent/bills/gas/whatever else they wanted money for. We finally had to refuse to give anyone cash, and went to a grocery gift card system so that we could be fairly certain the money they needed for food, actually went to purchase food.
I could write examples of the people who've taken advantage of our good will, but I don't want anyone to think I'm just that cynical about people needing help. I know there are people who are in need, and as a church, a lot of people think it's our job to bail people out of their problems.
See, the thing is...we can't afford to do that for everyone who calls and asks for help. But, if we do it for one person, we'd have to do it for everyone. We don't have the resources to pay for rent, phones, food, hotels, and things like that for everyone who asks. It has been that way for the past few years, and unless we get a huge windfall of money, we probably will never be able to do that.
BUT...here is the quandary. This morning I was asked if I would personally give someone a certain amount of money. This person is a kid our church and they need to pay a cell phone bill that they will not be able to pay otherwise. This particular kid (teenager, I guess, but not old enough to get a job) has very little in life. Terrible home situation, no dad in the picture...that kind of thing. The kid offered to come by the church and do work, but we don't have anything for them to do. Even if we did have something for them to do, it wouldn't be enough work to justify paying them the amount of money they need for the bill. I considered just writing a check and telling the person who asked me to do it (the kid didn't personally ask me) and having them give the money to them, but I realized that would possibly be opening a door that couldn't be closed. I'm not saying specifically that people would come to me for money, but they might start asking the church for money, and if we helped this kid, why can't we help this other person? Or what happens if the kid can't pay their bill the next time? Would the money fairy need to pull out the checkbook every time?
One one hand, I can afford to give them the money. That isn't the issue. I'm not a stingy person by nature, and money is money and it's going to get spent one way or the other. On the other hand, I can't set a precedent of handing over money for cell phone bills or things like that, especially for kids who might mention it to other kids, or even adults, who have needs and then where will it stop? We tried to think of a solution, of inventing work they could do, but even then, I don't feel there is a good way to do this. If it were something more important than a cell phone bill, I don't know if I'd feel the same way or not.
I realize how awful this makes me sound. I just feel icky about the whole situation. I just don't think any of us giving them money is a good idea. We can't open ourselves up for the kind of problems this could cause. We're working on a solution, but I don't know what we actually should do.
3) Our church caught on fire a little bit last Saturday.
We had a workday to clean out a bunch of junk that had been accumulating in the unused rooms of our church for the past 25 years. I never thought that so much junk would end up in a place that isn't regularly inhabited!
Only five people showed up, three men and two women (plus two little kids and two ladies who were cooking for a fundraiser) but we hustled and managed to shovel out the worst of the junk from the basement to the second floor in just a couple of hours. While we were finishing the upstairs, the other woman came back from downstairs and mentioned that she smelled something smoky in the hallway. We'd had a door open on the bottom floor so that we could carry junk outside, so the guy who knows things (he really does, that is not sarcastic) said it might be the heat exchange trying to regulate the heat in that hallway (it was a cold day, so it would have had to work harder) and we figured he was right. I went downstairs and smelled the smoke, too. Granted, my sense of smell is so strong that I can sometimes smell lights turning on, if there is dust on the bulbs, but it was a very obvious electrical burning smell. Still, we couldn't find anything, and me and Amanda looked everywhere we could think of for signs of fire. We even opened the closet where the heat exchanger is and didn't see or smell anything in there. So we walked into the church lobby. We saw a tiny bit of smoke floating near the ceiling, but because neither of us could see where it was coming from, we thought it was just dust burning off of the heater.
I know you probably think we are complete idiots, but don't come for my neck, I've never been in a fire before, ok? I smell things all the time. I smell heat, and the ghost of food, and can even smell cold, but we didn't SEE anything other than the smoke, which was such a small amount that it didn't alarm us. So I opened the double doors to let it out so that...get this...it didn't set off the fire alarm. Oy. We went on to do some other things.
I walked into the office to bring some things out we would need for Sunday services, and I just happened to turn my head in the right direction and saw black smoke coming out of one of the air conditioning grates. I honestly didn't know what I was looking at. That sounds crazy, but it wasn't big billows of smoke, it was a black haze coming out of the grate and spreading over the ceiling. My brain didn't register it as even being real at first. I finally yelled out that there was smoke, and the guy (one of our deacons) walked into the closet and realized the exchanger was actually on fire internally. The reason we couldn't see or smell it was because it was enclosed in the housing and the smoke was floating through the ductwork.
We were very lucky that we had people in just the right places to take care of what was happening. The deacon told me to call the fire department (so I got to call 911 for a 5TH! time since starting work here) and he found the extinguisher and put out the active fire, they got the kids outside, and we eventually got everyone out of the building just in time for all of the firemen to show up and make sure all the fire was out.
Amanda and I sat with the kids and kept them occupied and out of the way of everyone, and thankfully the only thing that was damaged was the machine in the closet and some smoke damage in the lobby. It was still rather stressful, but thankfully after the smoke cleared, literally, the damage was minor. I actually felt bad that the firemen came in their whole kit, but I know they had to come and make sure it hadn't spread into the walls or into the second floor.
After that we went home and I didn't let myself think about it very hard until I went to bed, and that's when I realized how badly it could have turned out. The fire happened because a belt broke inside of the machine, and it took three people actively looking, sniffing and being curious to realize it was happening. Ostensibly it happened because the heater had turned on due to the door being open, but since it was a cold day, that would have happened anyway. The ladies cooking downstairs would have been there even if the rest of us hadn't been, so if that fire had started, they wouldn't have known until it was too late, and might have died. The location of the closet where the heater was is perfectly situated that if the fire had gotten bigger, it would have torn up through the cooling system and started burning the second floor, as well as an adjoining room where we keep choir robes. Also, we had shoveled out a ton of junk from that closet, which would have been great fuel for spreading a fire into something much bigger. I just let myself have a little cry and was very grateful that we were there to catch it before it destroyed the building.
I don't really have a clever way to end this story except I'm really glad our church didn't burn down.
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