Yesterday our theme in worship and the small group lessons centered around relationships and how important they are to our life of faith. Today, at our work site, God seemed to be bringing that message home.

For the past few days my crew has been struggling a little bit to complete our assigned tasks: painting a deck, painting some wrought iron porch railings, hanging a safety light, and hanging a stairway handrail. Part of our difficulty involved having the wrong supplies. It took us more than a day to get the correct color of stain and it wasn’t until this morning that we finally had the railing, stain, and hardware all in place so we could move forward on what seemed like a simple project. Our group was a little discouraged about the slow progress we were making.

That all changed today when we not only got all of our materials straightened out but also discovered that we were being assigned another crew to work with us. This crew had completed their tasks and were reassigned to our project. It was just the lift we needed. With the additional six workers and, maybe more importantly, with the renewed enthusiasm they bought, we were able to complete all our tasks before the end of the work day.

Projects like this are good reminders of the importance of welcoming help. We could probably have persevered and finished everything by Friday afternoon but the synergy of the two groups working together not only made us more productive it also gave us a renewed energy. We are looking forward to our final day actually exceeding our expectations of the past couple of days.

It was just a reminder – God wants us to work in partnership with one another. Sometimes that means we are the helper and sometimes it means we are the helped. We give thanks for our work partners today and pray we are able to lighten someone else’s load in the future!