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Broken                        1 Corinthians 10: 13                   March 7, 2010

When I sit down at my desk and power up my computer, as I do most mornings, my home screen includes a little box that displays the local weather forecast for the next five days.

It's a handy feature. But on most mornings, I barely notice it. The weather isn't normally high on my list of daily concerns.

Until this winter, that is. Since last December, and for the first two months of this year, for 20 or so volunteers from the churches here in Riverside - me included - the daily forecast has taken on a whole new meaning.

Because, if the temperature, factoring in the wind, is forecast to be below 20 Fahrenheit, our County Health Department will declare a "Code Blue;" and that means we have work to do.

Some of us need to get ready to stay overnight at our Shelter, others need to make sure that there's enough food for the guests who will be staying over, and still others need to make sure that the site is ready when we open the doors: heat turned up, coffee pot plugged in, that sort of thing.

This winter, for the first time since anyone can remember, there have been fifty Code Blue nights here in Burlington County. That's fifty nights when folks without any place to come inside to sleep would, except for our shelter, have risked hypothermia, frostbite or even death from exposure to the elements.

I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that every one of those 20 or so volunteers is happy, today, to feel the warmth in the air and see that the temperature - for the next few days anyway - will not be even close to 20 degrees.

It has been one rough, tiresome winter.

Our Code Blue "team" has learned a lot from our experience. We know a lot more than we did last November about how to run an emergency shelter - about all of the i's that need to bee dotted and all of the t's that need to be crossed.

But most of all, we know, on a personal level, that there are men and women right here in our home town that not only look at the winter weather forecast as a potential inconvenience, but literally see it as a matter of life and death.

The homeless population here in Burlington County is no longer an abstract concept for those of us who have volunteered at the Shelter this winter. It's a group of people - people much like all of us - with names and faces and stories to tell, most of whom never dreamed that they would find themselves in a situation where they have nothing but the clothes on their back and no place to call home.

Even with the experience of this winter fresh in my mind, I still have trouble imagining how difficult it must be to live the life that most of our "Code Blue" guests live every day. I don't know if my body - or my spirit - could stand up to such a life. Such trials, I fear, would leave me broken.

I have enormous admiration and respect for people who endure great hardship and manage to rise above it and not be broken.

One of those people is Lily Casey, the central character in Jeanette Walls' true-life novel, Half Broke Horses; one of the best books I have read in a long time.

Walls is no stranger to the difficulties of life. Her personal memoir, The Glass Castle, begins like this:

"I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening," she writes, "and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. She had tied rags around her shoulders to keep out the spring chill and was picking through the trash while her dog, a black-and-white terrier mix, played at her feet. Her eyes widened with childish glee when she found something she liked. I slid down in the seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue."

Half Broke Horses is the second book Jeanette Walls has written about her family. In it, she narrates from the perspective of her grandmother, Lily Casey, who taught school, played poker, broke mustangs and won races. One reviewer called her a "Grandmother With a Heap of Gumption." An apt description, indeed.

Lily grew up on farms in the sparsely populated Southwest, learning self-reliance and doing chores without complaint. At age 5, she helped her father train carriage-horse teams and, once a week, hitched up a buckboard and drove into a nearby town to sell eggs.

And her hardscrabble life continued. After the family's dugout dirt home collapsed in a flood and a tornado smashed in the roof of their next house, they moved to a ranch in New Mexico. There, because her father had a gimpy leg and a speech impediment, and, as she says, "was never the most practical man in the world," it was Lily, at age 11, who hired and fired laborers and oversaw the tilling, planting, harvesting, peach picking and manure spreading.

You get the picture. No trial, no test, was too much for this tough-willed woman.

Along the way, Lily married, had a daughter - Jeanette's mother, the one who, along with her husband, became homeless on the streets of New York - and she developed a philosophy of life that her granddaughter shares in the pages of her book. Nearly every chapter includes a moral of some sort - nuggets of homey wisdom, usually spoken in Lily's own voice.

Some of these nuggets are as spiritual as they are practical. Lily says, for example, "When you're in the middle of something, it is awful hard to figure out what part of it is God's will," and "everything in life has its purpose, and unless it achieves that purpose, it is just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time," and my personal favorite, "anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito."

All of this wisdom grew from a life experience that could easily have broken Lily's spirit. But it didn't. Instead, it strengthened her resolve to take whatever life gave and make the best of it.

The message Paul conveys in our Lesson for today is rooted in that same wisdom.

Paul's mission, as we know, was to take the Gospel to people in different lands. To people who had never heard of the resurrected Jesus.

And he succeeded, as we also know, beyond any reasonable expectation.

Paul did not have an easy life, however. He endured one hardship after another. He was beaten and harassed. He was shipwrecked three times. He had had stones thrown at him and he ended up in jail on several occasions because of his faith.

And, to top it off, as best as we can tell, Paul had some sort of physical ailment that just wouldn't go away; an affliction that he referred to as the thorn in his flesh.

So if anyone had the right to call it quits and throw in the towel, it was the Apostle Paul. His spirit could easily have been broken.

But Paul was not broken. Instead, he writes in his letter to the Corinthian Church, "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it."

A relationship with God, Paul tells his Corinthian readers, will make it possible for you to endure whatever it is that the world dishes out.

Because life, after all, is often unfair. Our mettle will be tested. But if we are faithful, the strength we need to endure will be there.

God, who has proven, again and again, that there is a way out, will also provide us with a way out.

And here is the key: God expects us to be the way out for one another.

As one scholar points out, when Paul says "no testing has overtaken you," and "he will not let you be tested beyond your strength," the "you" he uses is plural. Neither the testing, nor the strength to handle the testing, is presumed, by Paul, to be born by an individual.

We, the members of the church, are the answer to one another's prayers.

And we are the answer, we discovered again this winter, to the prayers of a whole lot of brothers and sisters that we didn't even realize we had.

We have had the privilege, over the past three months, of making a difference in the lives of some people whose lives, quite honestly, are broken. A small difference, perhaps, but a difference none the less. In much the same way that we have also made a difference in the lives of people in Mississippi and Indiana over the past three summers.

And in doing so, we too have been richly blessed.

To borrow the words of the unflappable Lily Casey Smith, we have experienced, first-hand, that "Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito."

                                                                             AMEN

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