Lent: Heartsick

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Blessing #5 - A roof over my head

Today was my last teaching practice for TESOL.  All I had to do was prepare and act out a story, equipped with props and strong characterizations.  I picked a story I drilled into myself (and everyone around me) when I was little: The Three Little Pigs.  This is a story I could tell in my sleep, if I wanted.  For props, I collected a bundle of sticks, some hay - straw - from my rabbit's stash, and a bag of rocks that I wedged out of the frozen earth this morning.  Except, I never meant to have rocks at all.

Yesterday, on the way to church, I found some broken bricks at the construction site across the street from my apartment.  I grabbed them, but realized that I was making a trip to Seoul right after church, and I didn't want to be lugging around bricks all day - although I finally could have answered "yes" when someone asked me if I had bricks in my purse, which may have been extremely gratifying.  But I digress.  My solution was to leave my broken bricks with a whole one that I found a few meters later.  I figured that no one would mess with a couple stray bricks.  I was wrong.

When I went to retrieve the bricks this morning, there was no sign of them.  Confused, I panned out and began to radiate from the spot I thought I'd left them, figuring I'd just remembered wrong.  Something about a bottle to my left caught my eye, and I went to get a better look.  Upon closer examination, I realized that the juice bottle was tucked neatly under a black plastic bag, almost as if it was a doll, snuggled into a made up bed.  Then I noticed an interesting layering of rocks nearby.  But black seemed like such an odd color for rocks.  Then my eyes landed on the distinctly circular hole in one of the rocks, and I registered it as a fragment of broken brick.  Finally, I began to put it all together.

The juice bottle was, in fact, marking a bed, the train bridge overhead serving as a decent roof.  The black rocks were not rocks at all, but rather the remains of a fire from last night, serving as a substitute for walls.  My bricks had gone to protect the bed's occupant from being burned to death.  I shivered.  My bricks had certainly been put to a better use than some silly story telling.

Today's Lenten Calendar entry (click on the title) suggests that today we give away something that is adding to the clutter in our lives.  I think I just found a good home for some blankets that have been slowly overtaking my couch.


When was a time that G-d reminded you that everything here belongs to Him, and we are simply stewards, waiting for Him to claim it back?