When I First Arrived
When I first arrived in Denver, I was full of visions about the future.
In my mind's eye, I created the perfect ten months. I watched myself become a master carpenter, a computer expert, while daydreaming in the airport.
I watched as I pulled infants out of the path of storm-blasted buildings, performed CPR on beautiful women, and saved entire towns from destruction with my sand bag walls.
I saw myself as some kind of sun-bronzed saint, and filled the next ten months with virtue and miracles.
The visions embarrassed me.
Still I gulped them down, pausing only to savor my genius and dedication.
I never imagined the tedium that service can entail.
It's the simple acts that no one ever talks about.
Mundane as filling out tax forms for the elderly, grueling as sanding thousands of foot-long boards to make children's beds safer.
It's a little known fact that most heroes die of boredom.
Never in those visions did I stop to really look around at the faces of the men and women working beside me.
My hands have mastered the secret language of chain saws and power sanders.
I have taught beautiful, forgotten children how to read. I have loved those who weren't cared for, and watched people who were considered broken perform miracles.
It has been the hardest work of my life.
And how to explain the meat of it to someone, but to say: I touched this world, and it kissed me back.
I bled for the mountains, and they revealed to me their secrets.
I swam in freezing waters and found my own endurance.
I carried those who could not walk, and they taught me how to stand.
But I am not a hero. I know that now, because I walked beside them. Men and women whose hearts pump fire, to whom adventure is everyday, and courage a common thing.
They are my friends, my brothers and sisters, my teammates. I love these people for teaching me how to serve and for giving me a gift that I can never repay: humility. |