Olive Crest United Methodist Church
7180 North 60th Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68152

Our Pastor

Rev. Debra Tompsett-Welch

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The Spiritual Life

September-October 2002

Angels, Roofing Squares, and Building God's Kingdom Or How to Do the Impossible One Square at a Time.

By Rev. Michael Lee Burgess

As with most great disasters, and great adventures, this one had a history that started long before the event. In our instant society, it is important to look at how things developed so one can learn from them, a good example being world politics. But this disaster/adventure happened much closer to home. On our church secretary's home, to be exact. It turns out there are two kinds of house insurance in regards to roofs. There is the kind that pays to replace a roof if it is damaged and the kind that pays you what the insurance says the roof is worth now, after years of getting old. Well Gabrielle and Jeff have the second kind, and when the heavy hailstorms of last year came through, it really beat up their roof. The insurance company gave them money, but it was not enough during that time of inflated prices to have it done. Then of course their car died and they had even less money. They got a loan to do the job (that was also an adventure). Now it is a year later, and the roof has to get fixed. Prices have come down, but this is not an easy roof. It has a very steep pitch, is two and a half stories high and it has five layers of asphalt shingles on top of a layer of cedar shake shingles making that roof around 90 years old, (that is illegal by the way under today's code, the realtor slipped them a fast one).

Well since this has to be done as cheaply as possible, we turned to our church friends Steve and Kim Ramm and their Exterior Solutions company. We wrangled back and forth trying any way we could to keep the price down and it turned out we could save around $190 if we picked up the shingles ourselves and put them into the dumpster. Well that sounded like a good deal, and that could keep the price down to that bare minimum which was all the money we had, and they couldn't get any more. It had to stay around the $5,000 loan. So they asked around for help, and I said, "Sure, I would be glad to help." I had seen the cleanup at Mom and Dad's house and at the parsonage, and it was no big deal, 2 to 4 hours and done. A pretty good hourly wage that. Also I have been getting a lot of pressure from the Annual Conference to do more exercise to try and keep our health insurance costs down. I walk on Mondays, but don't get much other time in, so this would be good for me as well as a learning experience. My friend Josh volunteered to help me on Monday, and so we began the avalanche.

We showed up, and it didn't look anything like Mom and Dad's roofing job. The piles in the back yard were higher than my knees and these sharp spikes of wood slivers were poking out. Also, instead of using flat roof shovels to take off the shingles, they had used potato forks and the bottom layers of old asphalt had broke up into two to four inch pieces. This was just the back third of the house. It had that smell of old hot wood and coal dust. I know that smell; I've lived in lots of old parsonages. I shuddered and looked at the dumpster. They had called it a fifteen yard dumpster. I hadn't known what that meant. It was two feet taller than I am on the inside and as big as my bedroom. Well we got clever, made ramps out of plywood, got my wheelbarrow from Mom and Dad's and also the next door neighbor's wheelbarrow, and we started in. The piles in the back started going down but the mountain in the dumpster kept getting higher. After the first day it was two thirds full and we had to close the back of the dumpster. We had done good. We had helped out part of our church family. I had done exercise, and I could see something accomplished that I knew was needed. That is true every time I do something to help build God's kingdom in this world, but often it is hard to see the progress. Here it was obvious. That was a good feeling. But boy, were we tired.

Well the next day Josh was too tired to help again. That made it only Gabbie, Jeff and me. The doctors won't let Jeff lift anything over twenty pounds (even though he does it anyway). He came up with the idea of using these four small bins. We filled them, put them in the wheelbarrows then I moved them around the house and tossed them up over my head into the dumpster while Jeff stomped them down and tossed the bins back out. This was pretty fun, we had a good time talking. But the dumpster was getting pretty solid. Kim mentioned something about overweight fees if it went over 6,000 pounds? Must have heard that wrong, it can't be that much weight.

Now it is the next time I can come. Jeff can't help today because he has to go to work and no one else can help. It is only Gabrielle and I and they have filled up the nice older lady who lives to the north's driveway. It is up to my knees again. Suddenly I was filled with despair and my energy just started to drain away into the ground. They only way we have been able to do this is to put the Gabbie's kids in the Day Care for about $40 a day. I look at this huge pile, I feel how tired I am and I do some math and I say to myself. "We aren't saving enough money, this is not worth saving $190." Especially when they are saying we might need a third dumpster. So I go to the crew that is working on the roof and through an interpreter I ask about the price of finishing. I was thinking that with all the work we had done, then maybe they would knock the price down a bit. But finally I understand that $190 was for a normal roof. For this roof it was $250 a dumpster, even for the one we almost have filled. That could be $750, and we don't have that much money.

I walk around the house and look at that huge long pile. I just stare at it and I swear it starts growing. Then young man who spoke broken English, Santos, came around the corner of the house and said, "Not so bad, (something in Spanish)... seen worse." He leaned down, slid his hand in between some of the tiles, picked up a bunch and dropped then into our bin. He had half filled it. He said, "See, no problem." Smiled at us and walked away. Remember that the world Angel means messenger for God? Now the mountain had not gotten any smaller. It was still darn near a third of a football field long. But I wasn't looking at the mountain anymore. I was looking at the spot he had picked up from. There was a small dent there. Roofing squares, which is what they use to figure how many shingles you need, are around two by two feet square. I looked at only that little square. I put an invisible square around the space where he had moved shingles and realized that small pile was a quarter smaller than it had been. I got out Gabbie's big grain shovel (it was a gag gift she got at her baby shower that has been really useful, lots more than the bread machine). I scooped another bunch and the first bin was full. Gabrielle started in and we filled the bins, I wheeled them around and tossed them in. The first square was empty. We started on the next square. Suddenly the last little two by two foot square was empty, and so was Winona's driveway. It was time to go get cleaned up for my evening meetings and counseling sessions. But there was no despair. I was not depressed; tired and dirty yes, but feeling pretty good, and looking forward to being clean and sitting with the family of God trying to help our church work for God.

Now the adventure went on for quite a while after that, though it turned out we only needed two dumpsters and some fixing up of last minute problems with vents and the eves that Steve is dealing with. I even got to put the old stove from the parsonage in the dumpster and save the church the $50 disposal fee. But the really valuable gift I got out of this adventure was a "teaching experience." It was not a new lesson, but it is one that I had forgotten and I needed to know it, and so do you.

All problems, no matter how big, are made up of small pieces. The mountain of asphalt and wooden spikes was made up of two by two foot squares, or bins or wheelbarrows. However you look at it, it is made up of pieces. You have to see the pieces or you can't do it. If you see the pieces, it is just a matter of walking your way through it. One day when Trisha was over helping out, she yelled at me to pay attention to my body, listen and drink more water. (She works in an un-air-conditioned warehouse and during the summer it gets crazy hot in there. She knows what she is talking about.) Remember how I said that the word Angel means messenger for God?

Suddenly I realized God has been talking to me for months but I was so fixated looking at the mountain of problems, especially financial, that I was not listening to God. I realized I needed to step back and look at a two by two foot square of those financial problems too. They are all made up of small pieces. We were horribly behind on our Apportionments (our Mission Giving for those who don't know United Methodist speak). Angela Kroeger came in and said she had some things she was thinning out of her one room apartment and she would like to donate them to the church to help raise money for Apportionments. Could we have a garage sale? Tymna Vacek and Hazel Burgess took it and ran with it and suddenly we had twenty people working on this project and we raised $1,500 toward those Apportionments. Almost exactly the amount we were short of where we were last year at this time. When Jesus fed the 5,000, he started with five loaves and two fishes from a child. A small part, a two by two foot square. Suddenly the huge, unsolvable, undoable problem was gone, and they had leftovers (my favorite food).

Do you see the teaching? Everything is made up of small parts, and God works in those small parts to bring about creation. All I have to do is my small part. And I can do that; it's not too big. I can't do it all, but I can do this tiny part. And strangely enough, suddenly the problem is different.

We stand in the midst of the Holy mystery of God's work of creating the world. We look at the big picture and I am filled with awe, but I don't know how to help to be part of something so grand. But I have just forgotten to look small enough to see God's hands at work. Look with me. We have a whole lot of little things to do to help build God's kingdom of Love in this broken and hurting world.

Your brother-in-Christ, Rev. Michael Lee Burgess

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