I was standing in the doorway of my kitchen and water started to drip from the doorframe above my head. I bolted up to the second floor and found a water fall in the second-floor doorway.

It was raining inside my house! Water was pouring down the doorways, first and second floor. I bounded into the attic, looked up and stood there wondering, “Why can I see speckles of grey sky from inside my attic?”

My slate roof was at the point of total deterioration! Thankfully, the storm was short-lived and the next few days were dry. Time to repair – actually replace – a third story roof. So I did what I had done many times before. I called Pop-Pop Allem to the rescue. My Dad.

He was the King of Repairs. My roof needed everything. Plywood, paper and shingles. We had ladders on the ground, ladders on the roof. It was quite a precarious operation.

One day, he was carrying a 4’ by 8’ sheet of plywood up a ladder by himself. You know what that means? He had no hands for his ladder. All it took was a puff of wind and the plywood went one direction and my dad went the only direction he could go – down. He fell off the ladder and landed on my neighbor’s BBQ grill and crumbled onto the deck. He only had bumps and bruises amazingly.

I knocked on my neighbor’s back door and said, “I want to say I’m sorry and thank you.”

 “What for?” he said.

“Well, the I’m sorry is for breaking your grill. I’m sorry. And I need to say thank you because your grill broke my dad’s fall – Thank you!”

More repairs. My neighbor’s grill, my dad’s bruises and my dad’s pride.

We finished repairing the roof in three days, just in time for the next storm. Literally, I was nailing the last shingles on the peak when the rain started to fall.

Repairs are part of life. Like death and taxes, we can’t escape the need for repairs. Our world is in desperate need of repair, I think you’d agree. We have relational repairs, economic repairs, political repairs, racial repairs. We budget money, create programs, attend protests. On the news we witness humanity’s great need for repair. But if we concentrate on the great need of the world without doing something in our own little world, the need for repair turns into utter despair.

I think that’s part of why John Krasinski (you might know him as Jim Halpert from the TV series The Office), launched a YouTube channel dedicated to good news. It’s called SGN – Some Good News.

On March 25, 2020, during the COVID-19 isolation, he asked his Twitter followers to share things that made them feel good or smile. He wanted to restore and repair the spirit of our people. So many liked the idea that it became a YouTube series of eight episodes. Now what was truly amazing was that sponsors like ATT and Pepsi flocked to the show and its stories to fund causes created to care for others – to repair and restore.

Pepsi committed $3 million to the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund and AT&T gifted three months of free wireless service for frontline nurses and physicians nationwide.

Krasinski’s little world got big real quick. That’s not going to happen with most of us. But I think SGN points out something critical to caring – it all begins with the heart. Money is important, planning is important, even protests are important. But doesn’t all change start with a person’s heart?

Maybe all repair work begins with the heart, too.

I want you to meet a woman. We don’t know her name. She was an outcast, marginalized. All the village women went together to the well for water at daybreak. She was too ashamed and unwelcome. So she went to the well at noon in the heat of the day, assured that no one else would see her there.

But on this day, a young man was sitting down next to the well. He asked her for a drink. She was shocked because she was a Samaritan and he was a Jew. The centuries-long racial divide forbids them to speak to each other.

She said, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water…Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” (The Gospel of John Chapter 5)

Five failed marriages. And the whole village knew it. Why did Jesus have to mention that? Was He being mean? No.  Jesus reveals the deep longing in this woman’s heart. A heart looking for a man to love her deeply, genuinely and satisfy her desire for companionship. She tried five different men in marriage and her soul was still unsatisfied. You might say she was thirsty for the right kind of love and couldn’t find it, even with the sixth man she was living with now.

Jesus was beginning to mend a broken heart. He says he can satisfy her thirst with an inner satisfaction that will feel like its own fountain inside of her. A spring of water inside that never runs dry. With this she recognizes that Jesus is special.

Somehow, this man lovingly exposed the brokenness in her heart and then placed in her a fountain of forgiveness and dignity that no one else was willing or capable of giving her. And her joy spilled over as she ran back to her village and told how her heart was touched, her shame removed and her dignity restored. The same people who shamed her were astonished at the change they saw and they followed her to meet this man Jesus.

I love this Psalm: “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” Psalm 34:18

People all around you in your world need a little repair. If we sit down by the well long enough and open our eyes and our hearts wide enough, God will lead us to them.

Here’s a story about a woman, not in the 1st Century but in 2020. A few weeks she told us a story about a young man she met – we’ll call him Kevin. It’s not his real name. She saw on her regular walks around the community park that Kevin was always hanging out at the pavilion. Then she noticed him asleep in the pavilion. One day she approached him and asked if he needed anything. As she and Kevin conversed, she listened to his story of being homeless in the suburbs. Jail, an ex-girlfriend and no place to live. She brought him food and water over the next few days.

As their friendship deepened, she asked Kevin what he really wanted. He wished he had a place to live. At this point, the police had kicked him out of the park. When they spoke next, Kevin approached her and said, “I want to go home.” Home was in Ohio and he had no place to sleep now.

Our friend contacted his family, secured a hotel room for the night for Kevin and bought his bus ticket home to Indiana. She got gift cards and snacks for the trip and a trac phone so Kevin could stay in contact with his dad and with her during his trip and afterward.

Now, Kevin lives with his dad and texts every couple of days to let her know how he’s doing. The latest news is that he hopes to enroll in college in the fall to continue in his degree program.

This unassuming angel in the ‘burbs opened her eyes and her heart and God used her to do some restoration work with a homeless 26-year-old far from home.

The world’s in need of repair. People all around us need restoration. Get out your toolbox. You have one, you know. With special tools that have your name on them. Offer yourself as an instrument. Build something into somebody. Fire up the sewing machine and mend a broken heart. Set up a tent and bring a friend in from the rain. 

When you offer yourself as an instrument of peace for a broken heart, you’ll be amazed at the adventure you may find yourself on.

Time to get down off this roof and get on with the day. Thanks for joining me for this sip of encouragement. Please take the time to share it with a friend.

Keep both hands on the ladder guys and remember: Life is best – when the broken-hearted find you with a gracious heart and a willing hand for some much-needed repair.

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