Lent Day 40 - Water

Water is really strange. Over half of a person should be water. Over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is water. A person will only live about three days without water. But that same life giving, life sustaining substance is one of the most destructive forces on the planet. It is insidious, relentless. It cares nothing for wealth or status, racial or economic backgrounds. It laughs at the efforts made to control it, makes a mockery of brilliant engineers. 

I grew up just a couple of miles away from the ocean. Frequently, news stories would run about the effects erosion was having on Palm Beach. The sand was retreating. Homes were in danger of falling into the encroaching sea. Hurricanes were a regular threat for people in that area of the land, although each year without a direct hit created a kind of rebellious idiocy - thinking that the residents there were somehow invincible. It only took one Andrew or Matthew to disprove that way of thinking. Even with all of the massive storms that have battered the US over the last few years, the “worst case scenarios” have still yet to happen in many places. I remember that down in West Palm Beach, the worst case scenario was a direct hit by a huge storm on Palm Beach. The storm surge would cover the entire island, then meet up with the storm surge in the Intercostal Waterway and charge inland to about three blocks from our house. I have to admit; I bought a little into that invincibility mindset when I was a dumb teenager and young adult. No more.

I have grown to have a deep respect for water. Watching Katrina devastate New Orleans or the tsunami wrecking havoc in Fukushima, Japan has a sobering effect on a person. But even moreso, trying to outrun a flood will make the reality of water’s destructive nature very very real. We have been through four floods. Not just “hey water came up into my yard” floods. In October 2015, a freakish combination of weather phenomena caused the city of Columbia, SC to experience a“once in a lifetime” city-wide flood. The kids and I were stranded in Florida, unable to get back home. Heather and the dogs were stranded in Columbia, stuck in our house. Fortunately, our house was on a higher level with a lake behind us. The water ran down our hill into the lake, so our house was fine. That wasn’t the case for most of the city, though. Levees that hadn’t been kept up due to budget cuts broke everywhere. The water raced through the city, which already had questionable drainage. It didn’t matter if it was a poor or wealthy area. The flood claimed houses and shacks. Luxury cars float just as well as old beat up ones. We had three floods in our time in Houston. Harvey in 2017 was the most famous one. But we had two others in our area of town in within a couple of months before we left. In one of them, Heather and our daughter were racing back home from a violin lesson, just a few blocks ahead of the storm that brought a wall of water down the very road they were on. The other one left us unable to get the kids to school - not a single route to the campus was open. But the school was! They said to make it if we could. This led to one of our favorite examples of our daughter’s spunky nature. She tweeted to the head of the school board, “Hey my guy. There is no way to get to the school.” She called the superintendent “my guy.” We laughed. 

So we went through four floods. Our houses were never affected, thankfully. We had to evacuate once in case the levee near us was compromised. And we got trapped in the house or hotel several times. But we didn’t actually deal with water damage. No, that took an overflowing shower to do what no full-fledged storm did. In May of 2022, in our house that we had owned for just 15 months, our master bathroom shower overflowed. We have a hair trap thingee (official name) on the drain. It has smaller holes so that hair doesn’t go down the drain to clog the pipes and cause an overflow. In a supreme case of irony, that hair trip shifted so that it blocked the larger holes enough for the water to build up. It then spilled over the shower’s small tile legs into the bathroom. Fortunately, I realized this before too much water had spilled out. I dried up the water in the bathroom and thought things were done - until I went downstairs. There was water all over the kitchen counter … and kitchen table … and floor. And there were water lines in the ceiling. We called our good buddies at Servpro. (We had to use them when a water leak damaged one of the support beams under our old house.) They came out and went about drying the place. The insurance adjuster came out. Most of this repair and estimation was done when Heather and I were in Michigan. Our poor oldest son had to try to deal with these people by himself until my in-laws came down to help. Our bathroom had a bunch of tile ripped out. Baseboards, sub floor. More baseboards in our bedroom were torn out. Then we had to get someone to come out and do the repairs. Hey, you know who is hard to get to come out to your house? Contractors. I called all over the place, had several people come out to do estimates. I got all kinds of “it’snot you, it’s me” rejections. Companies weren’t coming out to do small jobs. (This was a small job?!?) “We won't even come out for less than $5,000.” “We won’t come out for less than $8,000.” “We can charge you $5,000 and come do it, even though it isn’t close to that amount.” I finally found someone who could come out for a reasonable rate. The catch? He was booked up until March. Yes, this March. Ten months after the initial damage. We had to go for it, though. 

Then a couple of weeks back, I was having another of my super-fun vomiting episodes. I got a text from our youngest son. “The toilet is overflowing.” Well, make it stop. Put some towels down. I got to a place where I could go check on what was happening. The upstairs bathroom the boys use was full of water. We dried it up. I tried to see what was happening with the toilet. When I tried to get the hidden clog dealt with, the toilet again began to overflow. Then a third time. Turns out the flapper was stuck open, so the stupid thing thought the bowl was empty. I finally got the whole thing to settle down. We used two hundred towels, and we got the floor dried up. A few hours later, I went downstairs to get some water. It was one of those moments when you walk by something, pause because you think you saw something, then backtrack. Was there a shadow on the ceiling? No, there wasn’t A shadow on the ceiling. There were multiple shadows. Lines. Circles. Water marks. Oh goodie. I get to call our buddies at Servpro. They come out the next morning to look around. Water had gotten into the wall in the bathroom, our room (the other side), the ceiling of the living room. Insurance adjuster came out. “Didn’t you have a leak here recently?” Yeah, man. We love water damage. Now shut up and go look at the place. This is one case where the delay in repairs actually worked to our benefit. Our little contractor man was scheduled to come out just a few weeks after this new bout. I asked if he might be interested in adding on some work. He was delighted. As of this past Sunday, our home is finally back to normal. 

All of these experiences with water made me think. It is really bizarre how water works. It isn’t like we had a huge hole in our bathroom wall that allowed the water to get in. There was the usual tiny gap between the baseboard and the floor. How big is that? Not very big at all. But it is enough for water to slip in. Then once it is in, it just races along any surface it touches. It got down into the subfloor and found the joints in the living room ceiling, running along two different routes. It got under the tile, under the carpet. It didn’t need much space at all to do unbelievable damage. It is easy to picture the destructive nature of water when picturing hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods. The sheer quantity of water overwhelms everything in its path - washing out roads, levees, dams, nuclear power plants. But the really surprising element is how just a little bit of water can cause such damage. It doesn’t take a trillion gallons of water (the amount that fell in Houston’s Harris County during Harvey) to do massive destruction. Just an overflowed toilet, a blocked shower drain, a water leak can cause thousands of dollars of damage. 

There is another entity that operates in much the same way as water: words. Think about it. Words strung together become concepts, thoughts, statements. They work their way through families, communities, nations. It is easy to recognize the damage caused by someone who is launching horribly offensive diatribes on a grand stage. Someone like Hitler or Kim Jong-un or Putin cause massive amounts of destruction with their words. But we see them coming. What we don’t notice are those smaller-scale comments that sneak through. They make us doubt. They cause us to accept their tenets without checking the truth of them. We just let them slip right in, worming their way into our heads and hearts. Before we know it, we have accepted lies and concepts as truth that we never would have if asked to when they showed up fully fledged. Things like hate, ignorance, racism, marginalization of people groups thrive not on the loud blustery hurricane of thought behind a microphone. They are born and grow and take root through small comments here and there, unchecked thoughts. Eventually, with enough of those thoughts, people will accept those tsunamis of hatred. That’s how good people ally themselves with reprehensible ones. They don’t judge the small comments, the minor whispers. Those build and build and erode the walls between what is right and what is wrong. 

With this being Holy Week in Christendom, we see this play out in between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. How did the crowds in Jerusalem go from singing praises to Jesus on Sunday to screaming to crucify him on Friday? Nobody got up on, say, Tuesday and give a loud impassioned speech trying to convince everyone to turn on Jesus. It was a subtle campaign of rumors, accusations, lies. The religious leaders worked the crowds. They stoked fires of discontent. They played on the people’s fear and anger and frustration. The people weren’t mad at Jesus. They were mad at the Romans, at the collaborating Jewish leaders, at the religious leaders! But they bought into the steady stream of words until they were calling to free a murderer and kill an innocent man. It is easy to pass judgment on those people in Jerusalem back in those days. “Morons! Sheep! They should have known better. If I was there, I would have stood up for Jesus.” No you wouldn’t have. Not even his closest companions stood up for him. They ran away. Just like lots of well-meaning people didn’t stand up to a lot of horrible leaders. 

It is startling when you realize that you’ve bought into so many of these comments that you have accepted horrible lies as truth. I came to that realization years ago, when I saw how many racist beliefs I harbored. I would have stood up, saying I wasn’t racist. Yet, I had these blind spots. Nobody sat me down in third grade and said, “Okay, David. These are the racist beliefs you need to embrace. Let’s memorize them before our next meeting.” I just heard things. Small concepts that built on each other like evil Lego blocks. That’s how it works. Before we know it, we have accepted all kinds of awful things. Black players playing tenacious defense are thugs and bar fighters. White players doing the same thing are just aggressive. A white player openly disrespecting an opponent, showing them up, mocking them is just being spunky and confident. A black player doing the exact same thing is ripped apart on social media. A man speaking his mind is strong; a woman speaking her mind is a bitch. I guess that is why 2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us to take every thought captive. Even someone who doesn't believe in the Bible or Jesus can find great value in that instruction. This is getting to be harder and harder. With the constant influx of messages flooding our brains through the internet and social media, we often decide it is easier to just keep our walls down. How annoying is it to keep getting warning messages on a computer or phone? We just want to shut them off. They are warning messages! That means there is something wrong. And we do the same thing with the online firehose of information. We just inhale it wholesale, rarely checking to see if it is true or good or worthwhile. It just pops up, and we consume it. We do the same thing with family and friends and church. Even in those places, even with well-meaning people, falsehoods can be presented as truth. We should examine everything we are hearing, reading, and seeing. That is the only way to keep ourselves from being overrun and corrupted. Think about if we were half as diligent in protecting our minds from thoughts as we are in protecting our homes from water. The stakes are higher than replaced tile and baseboards.