Working Together To Help People In Need

I had been planning a sequel to Helping People in Need for months but didn’t. Events this weekend made me decide it was time. Since I wrote that article we’ve connected with Brian Kolu and BJK Energy. We’ve started working together to help customers impacted by the Sunworks bankruptcy. Sunworks was a national company that promised to take care of customers for 25 years. Instead it closed shop in a matter of days leaving hundreds of customers unsupported. Together we are trying to figure out how to help those people in need. I may write more about that in the future but not today.

Brian’s family like too many others lost their home in Paradise California in 2018. They scrambled and built a new home after that. Yet today their new home is almost a stone’s throw from the current evacuation zone for the Park Fire in California. Thousands of lives impacted by one person’s actions. They are still safe and are hosting four families who needed to evacuate their homes. I realized that was what I had intended to write about. How do we work together to help people in need??

Which brings me to the other part of the weekend again a person impacting thousands of lives but in a positive way. We are grieving the loss of a dear friend Kendra Whitfield Ellis. Her family, our family, our community was deeply touched by her life and heartbroken by losing her far too soon.

In our grief, I noticed that many of us felt a need to deal with our own grief by working together. We wanted to help with the funeral yesterday, support the family and do what we could. At least doing something to help, instead of feeling helpless.

Kendra was a special person with an incredible and lifelong ability to connect with anyone without judgment and for them to feel heard and supported. Above my computer in my office sits a note she wrote for my 50th birthday. I insisted that I didn’t want a party and my dear wife Christine honoured my request and asked people to email her notes instead. When I woke up that morning there were 50 balloons outside our bedroom door, many with notes from friends and family.I’ve kept all of them but had put up Kendra’s because she had a gift with word’s to inspire the best in others.

There were many tears shed yesterday at the funeral and it was a deeply moving service.Many people whose lives she had touched showed up to honour her life and well over a thousand watched online. Talented musicians worked together during the prelude before the service began as everyone was seated. The last song they sang before the service was a haunting rendition of No Hard Feelings by the Avett Brothers. That song is one of my favorite’s and I’ve often reflected on the lyrics and for me it captured Kendra’s life.

Unlike almost all of us she lived a life with no hard feelings. As the song observes “Lord knows, they haven't done much good for anyone. Kept me afraid and cold”?

The song asks? “When my body won't hold me anymore and it finally sets me free will I be ready?”.?

It goes on to say “Will my hands be steady when I lay down my fears, my hopes, and my doubts? The rings on my fingers, and the keys to my house” For over 31 years I’ve had a wedding band on my finger taking it off only occasionally when working on something. Yet there will be a time when I won’t and will I be ready with no hard feelings?

However, we live in a world that encourages us to have hard feelings. To divide into us and them, to polarize, to fight assuming that if somehow we “win” that will fix things. But I suspect most of us are grieving at the state of the world. We are experiencing wildfires, storms, war, refugees and famine and we feel helpless. Yet hard feelings aren’t the solution. We can only solve these problems if we work together.

Kendra cared about everyone and I was privileged to travel with Kendra and another older gentleman on a learning tour to Israel / Palestine in 2011. A complex situation with many hard feelings which Lord knows haven’t done much good for anyone. I must admit I was more hopeful then than I have been over the last number of months.

I honestly haven’t known what to say during these months. As Kendra’s? daughter Kyana stated yesterday in honoring her mother, “There are no words”. However as shared in the service Kendra had chosen to offer up her voice to ask and pray for peace. I can hear her voice as I write this saying, please stop, please stop hurting each other.?

I feel too often our solutions to this and other issues like climate change look as ludicrous as spending $300M to build a floating pier. A temporary solution that broke down repeatedly,? to deliver aid to children starving, injured and killed by bombs also provided by the same government. Is asking to please stop hurting each other not a better approach?

The morning that I learned of Kendra’s death I sat with the note she had written, tears and questions for God. I listed a number of other much older world leaders who I thought could have passed away in their sleep that night instead of her. Yet she was gone and they all would live another day. Your list of people might have been different than mine but our lists would come from hard feelings and wouldn’t really solve anything. So today in Kendra’s memory I invite you to hug those you love and try to set aside those hard feelings for others. A lesson I learned from Kendra. I would also ask you how can we work together to help people in need? I’ll leave you with the closing words from the song which Kendra could rightfully claim when her body couldn’t hold her any more:

Under the curving sky

I'm finally learning why

It matters for me and you

To say it and mean it too

For life and its loveliness

And all of its ugliness

Good as it's been to me

I have no enemies

I have no enemies

I have no enemies

I have no enemies