The Sunday Letter | Blessed South

This was one of those weeks. You know the kind. The kind that comes along every so often and keeps you so busy with the plain business of living that you never quite manage to sit down. The cooler air moved in this week, the first real crispness of the fall, and the colors have started their slow turn into the thing that makes the South so lovely this time of year. And I will be honest with you. I mostly missed it. I was in too much of a hurry to stop and take it in, and I expect I missed a good deal more than I will ever know.

It was deadlines, mostly. The kind that land on you all at once, several of them together, and a fair number that I never saw coming until they were already on top of me. One day the week is ordinary, and the next you are in that hurried mode we all find ourselves in from time to time, running hard just to keep up, with nothing left over to notice much of anything.

And yet. When I sit down now at the end of it and ask myself what I am honestly grateful for, it is not one single thing about the rush. Not the hurry. Not the deadlines. Not the scramble, or the worry that rode in alongside them. What I am grateful for, once again, is the people.

Because somewhere in the middle of all of it, I found that I needed help. Some of what landed on me at the last minute was genuinely out of my hands, the kind of thing you simply cannot do alone no matter how willing you are to work. I needed other people to step in. And they did.

Here is the part that gets me every time. It was not their job. It was not their obligation. Nobody owed me a minute of it. But that is not how it works down here. I did not have to talk a soul into anything. I just told them what the trouble was, and that helping with it was really a chance to do some good for other folks, and they stepped right up, gladly, and delivered beyond anything I had a right to ask. That is Southern hospitality, the real article, not the magazine version with the pretty table set just so. It is people who see you in a bind and come alongside you, not because they have to, but because down here that is simply what you do.

I have said it before and I will keep saying it as long as I am writing these. You can love the South for a hundred things. The food, the land, the long gold light of an October afternoon, the Friday night games, the music, the slow way an evening unfolds on a porch. But underneath all of it, holding all of it up, are the people. Take the people away and the rest is just scenery. It is the people who make this place a home, the ones who will drop what they are doing to help carry a load that was never theirs to carry, and count it a privilege to have been asked.

So that is my week, and my gratitude, laid out plain. If somebody stepped in for you lately, go and tell them what it meant to you. And if you get the chance to be that person for somebody else this week, the one who steps in when it is not your job and not your obligation, take it. It is about the finest thing a person can do, and down here it is one of the truest marks of home.

Take a minute with that today. Then go be somebody’s good week.

That’s the week. See you next Sunday.

The South, Shared.

Porch Light

A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South

I wrote up above about the people who stepped in to help me this week, and every word of it is true. But I left out the hardest part, which was not finding the help. It was needing it. I do not much like to need anybody, and I never have. Given the choice, I will carry the load alone, work the extra hours alone, and tell you I am fine long after I have quit being fine, because somewhere back down the road I got it in my head that needing help is a kind of failing.

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” — Galatians 6:2

We almost always hear that verse aimed one direction. Go help somebody. Carry a load for a neighbor. And that is right, and it is good. But there is a quiet second half of it we skip right over, because a burden cannot be shared unless somebody is willing to let it be shared. For every person doing the bearing, there has to be a person humble enough to set the thing down and say, out loud, I cannot carry this by myself. The verse does not work with only helpers in the room. Somebody has to be willing to be helped.

That turns out to be the part that takes the real humility. Pride is perfectly happy to help other people, and it rather likes the view from up there. What pride cannot stand is to be the one in need, caught in the middle of a mess, unable to manage on its own. But hear what the Lord said to a man who begged him three times to take a weakness away.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” — 2 Corinthians 12:9

Made perfect in weakness. Not in spite of it, but in it. The very place I am most ashamed to be found, worn down and unable to cope and needing somebody else to carry what I cannot, turns out to be the exact place God does some of his finest work. So when we white-knuckle our troubles in private, we do not only rob the people who love us of the thing God made them for. We rob ourselves of the grace that only ever seems to show up once we have finally admitted we are not enough on our own. This week I had no choice in it. The load was too big and coming too fast, and I had to let it be carried. And the grace of that humbled me more than all my hard work ever has.

So if you are the strong one, the capable one, the one who is always fine, hear this gently. Letting somebody help you is not weakness. It is you holding up your own end of the law of Christ, which was never meant to be carried alone in the first place. A porch light has always been about somebody watching the road for you, ready to help you the rest of the way home. The hard and holy thing is to let them. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.

And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.