A cry for help answered

Thursday afternoon I sat at my desk crying.
It's right on schedule... it's mid January (which means after the long December workload) Mike lost his job and i was tired from 74 hours on campus last week. (before i get mail, this week was MUCH better!) but i was crying, none the less.

I had hit the wall. I couldn't remember being this discouraged. What was it that had me over the edge? A pile of wood in the new unfinished basement. You see our basement is finally about to be finished. Construction begins tomorrow after about a 4 year wait. And, all the props, scrap wood, art studio droppings which have accumulated were to be removed somehow before then. I've known about the wood well, for about 4 years as the pile has grown but I didn't realize it would be up to me to get rid of it. Naive, per norm.

Morale on my team is kind of low right now. We're doing more with less resources. Isn't everyone? This is a blog for another day, but the idea of saying that we had about 10 hours of hard physical labor to add to their day off Monday, well it was this managers nightmare. I was stuck, stumped and a puddle.

So, I swallowed my pride, realized that I wasn't alone and fired off a cry for help.
Honestly, I don't remember the last time I did this. I'm pretty stubborn, bordering on martyrdom. I pride myself on showing up first, serving strong, not asking someone to do something i won't do myself, solving my own problems, cleaning up my own messes, you know... pretty independent and then at times unhappy about the isolation of independence.

When my boss/friend Jay heard my cry he took the task on, told me he would handle it and that I wasn't invited to be involved, thank you very much.
Now, it was his day off.
He had knee surgery about a year ago and this task was going to involve lots of stairs and weight to bear.
He had also spent Fri/Sat (the other part of his weekend off) working with some friends on a Memorial service.
It was above and beyond his call of duty, to say the least.
He emailed some of the guys at church, i mentioned it to Michael and voila' they got busy and got done in 3 hours what would have literally done me and my crew in.

None of them will want me to sing their praises, in fact, Michael, said "this is not a blog" ...so we can pretend this isn't about Jay McKenney, Tyler Braun, William Efird and son, Bob (Jay's father-in-law), Bryce Schroeder and Michael Fraser and learn that sometimes, when you live in community, it's ok to cry for help and let others help take care of things and you.

But acts of service is my love language and these guys are my heroes today.