Labor Day Surprise

Why Love's Labour Is Never Lost

I walked into a Menards (a midwest version of Home Depot or Lowes) on Saturday morning while I was in flight from some things, having made a spontaneous run to that store to repair something that probably didn't even need repairing. I was doing what men do when they don't know what to do.

While I was browsing the drywall anchor section, I ran into a handyman who had done some minor work on our home the past couple of years. He had been referred to me by an electrician to patch some drywall in our basement a couple of summers ago. We had exchanged two texts since then.

I asked him how he was doing. After an uncomfortable period of silence, he confided in me: it wasn't going well. “To be honest with you, this summer has been a struggle,” he said. He finished work on a construction job back in June, and he had been out of work for weeks. Then he lowered his gaze to the ground. He told me that he had been wandering around Menards all morning, hoping to find some work. “When I have found myself in this situation lately, I come here.”

That’s when I understood. It wasn’t a one-time thing, a bad day. He was in a dark place, and he had been all summer. Although he didn’t say it, I could tell that things were not going well at home for him either.

There are more than five senses, that I am sure. And whatever sixth or seventh sense I have been exercising for the past 15 years, including the sense of faith, and the sense of hope, and the sense of pain, were all activated. Every fiber in me, physical and spiritual, was speaking to me.

For whatever reason, it was clear that he was in a bad place. And I truly didn’t care what the reasons were. So often we hear a version of, often just implied: “if you’re smart and you work hard and XYZ [fill in the XYZ with whatever version of the prosperity gospel], you will be okay.”

No, I’d seen in my own life that this isn’t always true. Suffering comes for all of us. And the flip-side of this narrative is all the horrible things you begin to believe about yourself if you are working hard and you’re still struggling. You’re either “not smart”, you haven’t consumed the right podcasts, you’re not working hard enough, or whatever version of not ‘feeling saved’ you have come to believe about yourself.

I knew that I was in a position to offer some immediate, substantial work. I didn’t know what, but I’d come up with something. It was an opportunity to be creative. “Goodness, unless combined with imagination, runs the risk of being mere exhibitionism,” said one fictional Pope.

I asked him when he could start: he said "today." That’s how dire his situation was.

We walked around the store for an hour, planning a short-term project at my home. It was one of those things that I had put on my ‘someday this project would be nice to do’ list, but I had no immediate plans. Just sometime in the next 5 years, maybe I’ll….

But after our run-in at Menards, it quickly moved onto my “someone needs to do this work, and they need to do it today” list. A list I didn’t know I had. My 5-year plan turned into a 48-hour plan. And I knew that my wife, Claire, would understand.

He and I sketched out some diagrams of what my new, organized garage might look like on a piece of scratch paper. We googled some ideas. We brainstormed together. We strolled around Menards for a bit, working it out. I bought materials that we picked out, and then I fronted him some cash (I didn’t have actual U.S. dollars on me, so I downloaded and figured out how to use Cash App) for his time to load them into his truck and bring them to the house to get started.

I hadn’t worked with or seen him in well over a year, and the negative thoughts started racing: Why was he even in this position? What had he even done?

Now that I had given him the cash, would I ever see or hear from him again? Was I making a big mistake?

All the wrong questions.

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On Saturday evening, a few hours after our shopping spree, he showed up to deliver the materials to my house. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning, 9am sharp,” he told me. And he was.

Yesterday we spent most of the day working together. He was building the structure for our garage that we’d agreed on in my driveway (he had pitched me on the idea, and with some minor modifications I had agreed) while I was organizing and sorting things into bins inside of my garage. Claire made us sandwiches for lunch. I introduced him to our daughter, Rome, and we made small talk.

I don’t like to pry into anyone’s personal life, and I try to wait for relationships to unfold themselves. There is an order to time, and one thing needs to happen before the other. I offer you a beer and sandwich. We talk about the Lions. We comment on the guy driving too fast down the street. I put on a Spotify playlist and make some comments about the songs as they come on. John Mayer is good, actually.

At one point he was helping me sort through some old books that I had unwisely left in a cardboard box in my garage for the winter. A large family of mice had moved right in and made a nest out of them. Mouse droppings were everywhere. The books were unsalvageable.

“Uh, what do you want me to do with this box?” he asked. I had a good laugh about it and made a joke about God passing judgment on those books. From the small bits and fragments that I could find, I could tell that most of them were Italian-language books on spiritual theology from my time living in Rome. “Oh well…Good thing I internalized most of that stuff.”

He had also been helping me go through a lot of personal items so that we could eventually put things into bins on a new wooden storage rack that he’d built, including things from my mom that I inherited after she passed away in 2021. He was incredibly respectful, even reverent, of every item that he came across and felt that he needed to bring to my attention.

I realized that he and I had never really gotten to know each other properly before that moment. He knew I was a writer from the first time he had done work in my basement a couple of years ago. He had discovered what is essentially a podcast studio built into a bedroom closet, and that triggered a brief conversation about work stuff. He knew some basic details about my family, but not much about my past. I had asked him plenty of questions about himself, but I could tell that he had been sheepish about answering most of them.

It’s truly a strange thing to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a man you’ve only met a couple times in your life as he helps you sort through family heirlooms. I pulled my dad’s old parachute dating from the 1970’s out from one box. As I contemplated what to do with it, I remarked that my dad used to be in the Army’s 101st Airborne division and now was living nearby and suffering from Alzheimer’s.

He lit up at hearing my dad’s military history, and we talked about his own time serving in the Army—including three tours in Iraq and the trauma that had resulted from that, going door to door with a machine gun in 130 degree heat. It turned out that his dad had been injured in an accident when he was a young child and had suffered brain damage that resulted in dementia, too.

My mouse-eaten box of books stood sitting there, though, and it seemed to cry out for a deeper explanation from me. I knew he was wondering why I had all of those Jesus books in my house. And just as I was about to offer him some more details, he asked me: “Do you believe in…deliverance?”

“Do you mean…like spiritual deliverance?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, like people being freed from horrible things and stuff. Do you…”

In a moment I knew what was happening and what was being asked of me. It was one of those moments where my entire life, my whole vocation, makes perfect sense. I don’t have many. But I cherish the ones that I have.

I wanted to wrap my arms around him and embrace him. I could see the pain and how deep it ran. I wanted to bypass or do an end-around the hours of conversation that I knew we needed to have. (I thought better of the hug—I don’t typically make the first move with a man 50 pounds larger than me who is wearing a cut-off Harley Davidson tee, whom I am just barely getting to know.)

At least I thought I saw how deep the pain ran. I had no idea the depths of the darkness that he had endured. Over the next few hours, I would learn.

Out of respect for him and the intimacy of that conversation, I am not going to share more.

We stopped work for a while, and we had the conversation that we needed to have. Everything was on the table. We dropped our tools to the ground. We stood there, sweating, both understanding. It had taken us a few hours to get there.

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I wept last night just thinking about how if I had been scrolling my phone or lost in my head, unaware, I may not have even noticed my new friend standing there in the aisle of the drywall anchors section of Menards.

How many times have I been guilty of those sins of omission? How many times have I failed to let this type of grace break into my life and break open my heart? How many times have I been scared to let go of whatever firmly held plan I had for that evening?

Five hours prior, I was in my own head, firing off emails about a new literary journal, wigging out over whether or not I had time to accomplish everything I needed to in the coming week, complaining about my inability to say ‘no’ to things out of my own pride and lack of being able to accept my limitations. But by the grace of God, I think that this weekend, for once, I chose the better part.

The cynicism of the 2020s is something that must be actively battled against if we do not want our hearts to turn into stone. I’m sick of the midwit memes. I’m sick of the abstract political theorizing. I’m sick of the fear-mongering. I am hungry for relationships.

I was hesitant to practice active love in the moment. I was thinking about all of the things that could have gone wrong. I was feeling emotionally exhausted even before we ran into each other—I had ventured into Menards partly because I felt so overwhelmed that I just wanted to do a stupid home improvement project, in order to feel better. To feel productive? I don’t know.

I spent a good part of the afternoon and early evening yesterday giving something that I didn’t even think I had to give on that particular day. But the encounter with my unnamed new friend brought me back to myself—precisely by pulling me out of myself. And I thank God for that. I went to bed last night with gratitude.

When I woke up this morning, I realized that it was Labor Day.