Hurricane Katrina made landfall and destroyed almost everything in its path in late August 2005… the year of my own personal hurricane. On October 5th, 2005 I got on my knees in my room and buried my face in my open bible and called out to the One who had been calling me back. I walked in to work the next day and quit my job and left everything behind. Friendships, work, everything. I was desperately hoping life would get better…
But it didn’t….
… for months.
2006 was shaping up to be the worst year of my life, part 2… but for entirely different reasons. I was not living foolishly anymore but all of the consequences from the previous year still reigned in my life. I’ve realized there are a few types of miserable: You can be miserable because of what you’re doing, and you can be miserable over what you’ve done. Both are a beast.
Yet life goes on.
In March my church was taking a trip to New Orleans to help with the clean up as the city was still pretty much destroyed. I signed up and boarded a van and got a taste of what living with nothing looks like. I think I took one shower and beyond that used water bottles to wash my hair. I slept on a cot surrounded by hundreds of other people in a warehouse. The bathroom situation was terrible… we’ll leave it at that.
While in New Orleans my team’s job was to gut houses that had been flooded after the levees broke. These houses had been shut up for months. It was gross when we finally went in and the destruction was unreal. The neighborhood that my team was in was a ghost town. All that was left of the people who had once called the little houses home were their flipped over cars and trash.
Before we could rip the carpet up we needed to remove everything that had been in the house prior to the hurricane that had begun to rot due to all the water. So, we borrowed a few of the big green trash cans we could find from all the abandoned houses and rolled them in room by room throwing away former treasures. There was so much stuff. I remember getting into the trash can and jumping up and down on all the trash so that we could cram more in.
And that’s when I thought it… I remember standing in that garbage can and thinking to my OCD, clean self, “If I had known I was going to have to do this I wouldn’t have come!” Even as I was thinking it, my mind turned to the One who did know all of my filth and garbage and all that it would cost to bring me back… the cross, the blood, the horror… all of it… and said yes to me.
The day I stood in that garbage can was almost a year to the day that I looked in a mirror in a hotel room and told the Lord to leave me alone… that I hated Him. The realization that He pursued me anyways stands as a memorial to the truth that when I was covered in filth, I was loved, and when I got up off of my kness finally done heading in the wrong direction but still really, really suspcious that God was punishing me, I was still loved. I wish I could say my heart responded in awe, but really, I went right back to wrestling with this God I wanted something from with two things certain in my mind: I wasn't dead and so should live with hope, and I was known by the One who took on all of my garbage. I hope I never forget what I learned from standing in that garbage can: Love that suffers fully knowing the cost is crazy love.
… A love that won't let go.
