“Thimgs seems to happen to us that we don’t seem to provoke.”
NoLynch Atlas, From the Oracle, Hammerspace Publishers, 2024 Ed.
The above observation is known as the Lightfoot Luck, and it hit us pretty hard this week.
For the past five years we have been knocked down, again and again, and every time we think we have gotten momentum to start moving forward, something, usually the thing we expected to help move us forward, knocks us further down, and we have to pick ourselves back up and try moving forward again.
The knocks had gotten so bad through my attempts at employment, that I had given up the attempt to secure employment, since I wasn’t securing anything, but just creating another way for us to get knocked further down again.
We had even reached a place where attending church was a definite hazard. In the last two churches we attended, we had someone run an intimidation campaign against me to stop me from coming to church, I was assaulted during a worship service and no one would help me, someone slammed a door in Jasini’s face, and I have been issued tresspass warnings against setting foot on either of the properties. In both cases these started with us going to the church for help in reconciling an issue where someone had violated our rights and denied us our personal agency, and both churches turned our requests for help and spiritual guidance into a tribunal that kicked us out without allowing us to speak in our own defense.
Despite this, we continue to seek avenues of reconciliation with them both, if passively at the moment, since any active attempts will be seen as intimidation, stalking, harrassment, or some other illicit behaviour.
We also have continued to help those around us as we could. An accident in 2022 put me in the hospital intubated on a respirator, and the recovery from that also fueled the decision to put a hiatus on employment seeking. Between that and the COVID response of 2020 we depleated the retirement funds I had spent 30 working years accumulating, leaving us with our house paid off, but no income, and thus unwilling and unintended recipients of SNAP and MEDICAID.
Job Suite by Michael Card
Yet even on SNAP and MEDICAID, supplementing our food supply with visits to area food pantries, we managed to continue giving. Many times our well-stocked pantry served as a food pantry for some individual in need.
With the people, many homeless, who ended up at our door, and whom we provided what lift we could, would arrive unexplained items, left behind without explanation, that I kept and stored for a time they could be used. The number of times someone would say of some rare or esoteric item “if only we had …” knowing it couldn’t be found, only to hear me say “wait, I think I may have one of those” is beyond my ability to remember or count. As the number of such items I gave away grew, I realized I wasn’t owning these objects, I was keeping them in stewardship, for the person God knew would need them in some critical moment.
About three years ago, the transformation coming over our residence, both visually and spiritually, led to something I had always wanted: I had always wanted to own a place that had a name — you know, like The Hermitage, Mount Vernon, Monticello. By a quirk of colors and paints, our place had started taking on a rainbow appearance — Our rainbow was red, orange, yellow, green and blue — and so we decided to name the house “At The Rainbow”. The name does start with a preposition, for those of you grammar geeks, and at that time I changed the name of my blog to at-the-rainbow.blog
For us, the key to our name was Genesis 9:13, the root and real reason for the rainbow, though it certainly was not competing against the more recent applications of the rainbow in our culture. Genesis 9:13 is a statement of promise, after a time of division, a place for going forward because there is nothing to go back to.
And yet, if anything, this promise, this hope seemed to breed more enmity toward us than ever before. We held out a hand for hope and reconciliation, and instead were charged with hatred and anger.
We got knocked down again and again, until a year-and-a-half ago we could no longer afford to make our house insurance payment, because someone reneged on a deal and effectively stole the money for our house payment from us. And for the past 18 months we have been working with or for one person after another to put together the money to get insured again. Our greatest fear was to have something happen to the house and have no insurance.
We did things for “friends” in exchange for them helping us get the cash for the insurance payment, only to have one after another walk away from us without paying us anything. My attempts to collect loans from other friends made over the years got several who denied ever having borrowed the funds (One even sent us a note with an attachment proving they owed it as proof that they didn’t — he needs help with his reading comprehension!), and others who said they would pay, and then forgot about it and claimed not to know anything the next time I asked, until they recognized the debt and said they would pay, sometime, but we never saw any cash.
Recently, when one of these deadbeats bilked us once again, a common friend of us both felt somewhat responsible for this latest disaster, though I don’t see how he could, and actually came up with a way we could help him, and he could get someone to contribute towards our insurance fund. Last month we received the first contribution for helping a friend of my friend’s, and next week we would have received the second contribution from this person, giving us the ability to make our house insurance payment.
Instead, this past Tuesday, August 6, 2024, an arsonist set fire to our deck with an accelerant that would have killed NoLynch, except that the friend mentioned above, who we were helping his friend, happened to be at At The Rainbow, and noticed the fire almost from the moment it started and got everyone safely out of the house. But even seeing the fire almost from the moment it was set wasn’t soon enough to stop it. Once that fire with the accelerant was set, the house was doomed. The fire had been set immediately after Jasini and I had left to visit World’s of Fun, and we received the call about the fire from NoLynch as we were entering the park. We didn’t get to do anything but turn right around and come home to find the house a total loss.
I am not sure if there is a way to knock us down any further. And I almost didn’t type that sentence. If you believe in fate I just tempted it to show me exactly how much further down we can go.
We don’t know for sure who the arsonist is, but are certain it is arson. The Bomb and Arson Squad of the Kansas City police was there even before we were, 10 fire trucks from the city were there within 5 minutes of its start, and they couldn’t stop the fire. But if the suggestive videos and evidence from neighbor’s door bell cams, etc., are an indicator, we weren’t even the target. We had let someone house two dogs under our deck since he had lost a place and had no where to take them, and the probable suspect had wanted to kill him and his two dogs. But he and one of the dogs were definitely gone at the time, and we have yet to find the body of the other dog, so it probably got away.
We did nothing to provoke this attack, and yet one of my “friends” that didn’t pay us the money he had promised for our helping him had the nerve to send me a note saying that I was “totally responsible” for what had happened to my family to make us homeless. If that same friend had paid us, his payment, along with what that friend of a friend had paid us last month, would have meant we would have had insurance when the fire came. His breach of contract with us, in my view, makes him as much if not more culpable than I for our being homeless right now … “withhold not good from them to whom it is due when it is the power of thine hand to do it.” (Proverbs 3:27)
And yet dwelling on things like that, or the whole series of things above that I have chronicled for your reading pleasure, is not ultimately productive. I cried out loudly when I got the phone call about the fire, with a lot of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” yet even in that moment, a song came to mind that expressed how I ultimately felt. Actually two songs. In touring the site of devastation after the fire was out. I recorded two music videos where I panned the site while singing those two songs. Those videos are shown above in the blog, inserted in the order I thought of them, and want you to see them as my view of what happened. For I have wrestled with both extremes, but both songs ultimately come to the same conclusion: I will see my Redeemer, and I have lived, do live, and always shall live, in the Goodness of God.
We were raised to be self-sufficient, and the past few years have taught us a lot about how dependent, interdependent, we all are. I have learned a lot about being able to receive, not just being able to give. We can’t get back on our feet on our own. So we are starting on our knees, in prayer, and then we are reaching out to others with our story, asking them to assist as they feel led, knowing we won’t receive anything because we deserve it, but because of the goodness of others, and the Goodness of God.
Jasini has set up a Give Send Go Campaign where those feeling led can help us: https://www.givesendgo.com/GD2AK
My neighbor who has been most helpful since the fire, Andrew, made a comment as he stood with us watching the house burn. “You have helped so many people, you certainly will receive a lot of help in return.” I appreciated his sentiment, but found myself uncertain of its truth.
“For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same.” Matthew 5:46
We have given to those who could not give back to us, so we may have a reward in heaven, but in the calculus of this earth, we made poor inestments. None of them are going to do anything for us now. And why would others, whom we haven’t done for, when they didn’t need it, do for us, when we do need it? And yet we still ask.
At The Rainbow 