Have Lord - Will Travel: St. Petersburg, FL

It is a wonderful thing to realize that the Lord has a plan for your life. There are times when the Lord leads you into a seemingly innocuous activity for learning. My first NOMADS project was in St. Petersburg, FL. Looking back at it, that project was chocked full of learning opportunities. I can only hope that the learning stuck.

On the Tuesday before I was scheduled to head south for St. Petersburg the area around my cabin outside Hedgesville, West Virginia, got about ten inches of snow. I love snow. It is beautiful. My cabin in nestled in amongst the woods. I have no grass to mow and unless I have a hankering, I need to shovel no snow. The wildlife, aside from my self-indulged rare instances of partying, is abundant. Wild deer and turkey routinely visit me, ranging from fawns and chicks to noble bucks and strutting roosters. The ubiquitous squirrels are tolerated as a means of enjoyment. They try devious means to unload my bird feeders. I retaliate by stringing trout line between trees and hoisting the feeder just inches beyond the range of the squirrel’s leap. I watch from my back window as the squirrels glare at me from the safe distance of a large oak, and I at them with thoughts of raising a 12-guage shotgun and obliterating half the bark on that tree. I swear the squirrels are winning. They have apparently come conspiring with the raccoons that are better adept at unhooking lofty feeders and scattering birdseed for every sort of critter. I know the Lord made man higher on the food chain from squirrels but I do not recall seeing any reference in the Bible where I have to feed them.

I cleared the snow away from my trailer and packed for my first adventure. I was ready to hit the road by Thursday evening. The weather forecast for Friday, January 25, 2011, called for snow flurries. I woke that morning in anticipation of a leisurely drive down clean, albeit cold, roads and highways. Well, the snow flurries were a bit heavy. By early morning, the flurries had covered the roads and shown no intent of slacking up. It was a beautiful snowfall but I needed to drive. Further, I needed to pull my trailer for the first time in snow. Beyond all that, the road out of my place was a downhill slope with a T intersection at the bottom of it.

Not to be daunted by such trivial matters, I locked my cabin door, mounted my trusty truck, and slammed her into 4-wheel drive. She groaned under the strain, diesel engine roaring loudly, and slowly pulled herself and the trailer onto snow-covered pavement from the muddy parking spot beside my house. Happy to be doing what she was made to do, she pulled the trailer with a steady grip on the cold and wet pavement. With great pride, she rambled vociferously with enthusiasm and determination down the sloping pavement. Her brakes, though unaccustomed to such an overwhelming load, guided the massive bulk down the hill and through the turns as she gleefully navigated the curvy road and on toward the highway. Never has there been such a prouder moment in the life of a Dodge truck.

Perhaps not as confident as my trusty truck, I wiped the sweat from my brow, took a deep breath, maybe two, threw my gloves aside to rub my sweaty hands on my pants leg, and embarked on my first NOMADS adventure.

As I turned onto the Interstate, I left the falling snow behind. The farther south I traveled, I saw less and less snow on the ground. By the time I crossed the North Carolina border, I knew I was headed to warmer weather. This is not to say that I dislike winter. In fact, I love winter. I love the snow, skiing, watching the fire in my woodstove as it warms my cabin, and venturing out as I desire into the snow-covered landscape. During the summer I tend to stay indoors enjoying conditioned air and less humidity. I would rather avoid the heat of summer. So, why am I heading south during the winter? Well, the NOMADS projects are in the south during winter, confirming one of the many interpretations of the NOMADS acronym: Northern Old Methodists Avoiding Deep Snow.

I arrived at the St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, St. Petersburg, Florida, on the afternoon of Saturday, January 26. Not knowing what I was to face in Florida, I used my dependable navigator to guide me to the project site. Sure enough, I found the church where I was assigned. OK, around back, the directions read. This was a new one on me – I drove around the back of the church to see five trailers/RVs parked in the middle of the church parking lot. As I maneuvered into my space, I realized that all six trailers, including mine, received water from one ½-inch hose. Each of us had electrical hook-up but that was it. I later learned that on every Friday morning all of us would use a small macerator hooked to the trailer’s sewer outlet. All of this was enlightening. I knew I could survive.

Our team numbered eleven in all. I was the only single member and the youngest. I did not know what lay ahead of me and at this point in my walk-of-faith; I was not sure how much my faith would play a role in leading me through this project. The team leader met me as I pulled into the parking lot and directed me where to park. As I set up my trailer, having learned more than a few things in Marion, NC, during my first outing, other members of our team soon joined me. I found them very kind and friendly. Good deal!

The NOMADS project for the next three weeks included home repairs in the local community, arranged through the church. Presumably, because I had no specific skills in construction or the building trade, my team leader assigned me to unskilled labor. This was not all bad because I reminded myself that I was there to serve the Lord and would do whatever was asked of me. My expectations, however, plagued me with disappointment. I had emptied out my shed back home and looked forward to using the tools I brought. I hoped to either use them or at least learn how to use them. Another glitch for me was the team leader wanted to drive his vehicle to each project. Being my first project, I went along and did not insist on driving my own truck.

One of the other guys recognized my plight and invited me to join him on some home repairs. Unfortunate for me, the team leader had his own way of assigning work. As the third week of our project flew by, we completed our team evaluations and wrapped up our work assignments. My friend was given a small project of fixing a ceiling fan in a woman’s home. He told the team leader, almost in passing, that I would help him. Inside, I was elated, but kept it to myself. He and I drove to the home and found the broken fan. He quickly disassembled the fan. With surgical precision, he immediately identified the errant mechanism, and removed it with ease. Turning to his novice helper, who had learned about the inner workings of a fan by occasionally viewing the turning blades while lying in bed on a hot, sleepless night, he said simply, “It’s all yours.”

‘Huh?’ My desire to learn about the tools in my truck was far from my mind. My desire to be one of ‘them’ who understood all about things like electric, plumbing, tile, framing, and roofs, wore blue jeans with a heavy leather belt burdened with pouches of all kinds of neat tools of which I knew absolutely nothing about, and walked with an air of confidence that would overcome any construction project from building the Eiffel Tower to fixing a ceiling fan, brought beads of sweat to my brow. My mind went numb immediately, scrambled by imaginations of how was I to reassemble the multitude of small shiny pieces of STUFF back into the resemblance of a workable ceiling fan. To make matters worse, here was this small elderly woman watching through gold-trimmed spectacles from the doorway of her small bedroom with a look of admiration and trust at these two great repairers of ceiling fans towering over her, dissecting her beautiful fan into a million small pieces of shiny metal, plastic, titanium, or whatever they were made of, as if they were sent directly from God into her midst to perform one of His many miracles in her small world of living out each day of her life with the peaceful breeze filtering down on her as she slept cozily beneath the lovely bedspread that was now covered with the guts of her beloved ceiling fan. My hope was that she did not focus too intently on the sweat of my brow, the wringing of my hands as they trembled with fear of the moment, my stammering speech if only I could voice a small peep of response to my friend’s remark.

The Lord is present in this world of ours, no doubt. Further, a fellow NOMAD, well, this one, of course, would not leave his partner hanging. Perhaps sensing my sudden plight, waiting for the tsunami of my blood pressure to subside following the great quake to my nervous system, he stood by waiting patiently and understandingly as I fumbled with pliers and a screwdriver waiting for divine guidance to guide my hands. The Lord blessed me with recollections from childhood at my moment of certain death by nervousness overload. I remembered the scattered pieces of cardboard that once assembled correctly would make themselves into a small, simple puzzle depicting a clown and balloons. Leave it to the Lord to simplify things that are certainly otherwise massive, complex undertakings. I saw before me a simple puzzle that, once reassembled correctly, would make an operational ceiling fan.

Blinking away the flood of sweat, tears of self-imposed frustration, or more likely my attempt to clear my vision enough to see the many small shiny metal pieces without my reading glasses, I set myself to reassemble the fan. Again, the Lord blessed me with sufficient recall of my friend’s disassembly as to put the thing back together with only a couple minor delays in reassembly while mentally cursing the engineer who designed such a mass, or mess, of complex machinery in the first place.

The smile on the lovely face of the elderly woman as she watched the blades once again circle around and push air down upon her as it rotated silently in the small bedroom was more gratifying than any words of thanks she could offer. Her gratitude was apparent but it fell secondary to my satisfaction of accomplishment in overcoming this previous seemingly insurmountable task and doing something that I had dreamed of doing before joining this project.

My first NOMADS project was good, productive, satisfying, and enlightening. I learned that NOMADS serve the Lord by helping others. I learned the truth of what I heard from one NOMAD that when you come into a NOMADS camp, you have found immediate friends.

When I scheduled my NOMADS projects for the first few months of 2011, I planned to serve three projects, each with a three-week break between them. This, I learned quickly, was not smart for it caused me to drag my trailer back to West Virginia before heading to my next project. I was not organized enough at that time to store my trailer in the south during the cold months or work back-to-back projects with minimal travel between them. So, I headed home for a three-week break.