I was feeling bad about the state of my house, so this morning I dressed in grubby clothes and started scrubbing bathrooms. I’d barely finished the first one when I was called to come help with an emergency move-out. The woman involved is in the process of getting divorced, she works, and she has five kids. She was completely overwhelmed. Judging from the state of the house she has been beyond overwhelmed for a significant period of time. Ten to twenty congregation members converged on her house. We bagged, boxed, carted, and threw away. It was complete chaos. Nothing was sorted neatly. It is going to take the family a very long time to find everything. Most of the stuff is headed for a storage unit. The family has a place to stay for the next two weeks while they find more permanent housing. I am sure that things were packed that the family is going to need. As I was sorting dirty laundry from potato chips, I pondered how fortunate I am and how I should be spending more of my energy reaching out to my neighbors. It is good that we all came to answer the crisis, but it would have been better if we’d all been helping a little all month long so that there need not be a crisis at all.