I’m stuck…

This was my doing earlier today at work…I got a good size tractor stuck in very soft sand. A mistake I will never make again (I mean go in the location of this sand), but as soon as it happened, I said somethings I will not write out in this blog, but I was kinda at a loss of what I would do. I was by myself…no coworkers nearby…no one. I ended up calling some coworkers of mine, whom I gotten to know during my five summers of working for BearLakeFun.com. With the extra help, we  pulled out this tractor with two additional tractors and almost 100 feet of chain. Without these two people, I would not have gotten out.

Driving home I was mulling over what had taken place in the last two hours and many things stuck out to me, but especially community and friendship. These two things are essential in out lives. We are social beings and need others.

One of my favorite TV series is The West Wing, and in this series two great quotes apply:

“You remind me of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town. And that all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’ The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, ‘Hey, hey you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’ A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, ‘Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety. Well… the man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter, he demanded an audience with God. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I’m a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?’ God said, ‘I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?'”

I could go Biblical and say community is Biblical and so on, but let’s just look at this from a secular point of view. People are placed in out lives. People are placed in our lives for reasons unknown to us. Maybe it’s to teach us a lesson, maybe it’s to just be there for us, maybe it’s just the right influence we need in our lives, maybe it’s to show us the way out.

“This guy’s walking down a street, when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up ‘Hey you! Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes him a prescription, throws it down the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up ‘Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. ‘Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole! Our guy says ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here!’ and the friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.'”

Community and friendships have various different purposes, but one that stands out for me is that they exist to help us walk through life, to guide us through, to show us the way through difficult situations. Sometimes we just have to let people help us, accept their helping hand. This takes humility, but one which allows for growth. To realize you cannot do everything yourself is huge, because we are not alone, we are never alone, we will never be alone. We always do fine when things are going great, when we are just doing our everyday thing (in this case dragging buoys into the water), but what happens when you get stuck? Is it frustrating to get stuck? Yes. But what are you going to do next? You cannot stay stuck, you must carry on. There is work to be done.

Ugh…wet suit is on. Let’s get this tractor unstuck…

So my question to you is, who do you have to get you unstuck? To get you back to where you were? To get you back on solid ground?

Together we will survive.