Pentecost 25, Proper 28, Year C
Isaiah 65:17-25 * Canticle 9 or Malachi 4:1-2a
Psalm 28:2
Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19
Mending Work
... to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. -- 2 Thessalonians 3:12
We gripe a lot about work: groan when we awaken and realize it's Monday, long for the weekend to come. We begin to watch the clock in the late afternoon, and we're ready to go when it's quitting time. This can be true even when our work is something we truly enjoy. Work is work; there's a reason they don't call it "play."
We do all these things until we are unemployed. Suddenly, we want a job more than we want anything else. Now the leisure time we longed for in the old days hangs heavy on us. We feel unexpectedly unworthy, defective in some way because we are not working. We feel this way, even if we know our unemployed status isn't our own fault. Human beings need work. We're not okay if we're not productive in some way. How we are remunerated may vary from person to person and place to place, but we don't do well if we do not work at anything.
Your need to work takes a big hit when disaster strikes, along with your home and all your clothes, every pot and pan in the house, the dog, the cat -- all gone. But so is your job, and so is everyone else's job. So is the crop that was two weeks away from harvest, the fishing boat upon which you depended to go out each morning -- smashed to smithereens. You sit amid the wreckage and wonder who you are now.
When Episcopal Relief and Development and its local partners enter the wake of a disaster, it is with a fairly predictable array of things that will help: food, water, tents, medicines. Later on, though, the recovery is more colored by local realities that vary from place to place, rebuilding the structures within which people can work and provide for their families. Helping a shattered market for local goods come back into being. Replacing lost equipment. Maybe offering training for new trades.
We don't swoop in and out of disaster areas, dropping a few hundred blankets and some bottled water and then bowing out. Help is a long-term thing, and its goal is the return to self-sufficiency of the people whose working dignity has been wounded by nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
+
To learn more about ERD, to make a donation or to request a "Gifts for Life" catalogue, visit 
