When items once precious but now outdated by neglect or wear come to the end of their fruitful life, we are more likely to drag them along behind us, rather than toss them onto a refuse heap. Whether it’s school days memorabilia or household items we are sure still have useful life remaining, we carve, stack, sort and shove out a space for it in the attic, and then cart it from house to house in successive moves.

Once tucked away again, we don’t give it a second thought until the day we move again or finally throw up our hands and say, “This stuff has got to go!” After a quick sort we toss 90 percent of the stuff we considered so precious a decade earlier and compliment ourselves on the newly acquired floor space.

The same winnowing process seldom works for a church. Churches don’t move and instead, they accumulate memorabilia from ancient days like barnacles onto the hull of the congregation, increasing the drag and slowing forward progress.

On a recent double dip trip to Philadelphia I spent a day interviewing the architects of a transformation at First Baptist Church, one of the oldest congregations in the country.

Then, I helped my son clean out his attic.

It’s the same job.

The First Baptist Church congregation – a dwindling remnant of about 30 active souls – came to the stark conclusion in December 2013 that they had about six months of operating reserve before they would have to close their doors.

They worship in a magnificent, domed, stone and steel structure built in 1899. It is in the heart of center city Philadelphia. It sits a block from public transportation terminals, shoulder to shoulder with hotels and condos, a bulwark shouldering above a lace of streets and sidewalks teeming with tourists, shoppers, homeless and young professionals who live and work in the canyon shadows.

The building once hosted original oratorios. Tradition says ushers served in tails and gloves. The city’s most influential citizens plopped in its pews, either to worship or to be seen. Gold leaf covered the interior walls until a fire in 1949, giving the room a soft yellow hue.

Then the suburbs beckoned to members with children. Access to downtown grew more crowded and difficult. Expensive habits were hard to break.

And preserving the building became the congregation’s mission.

Maintaining the 68,000 square feet with century old systems sucked up their funds like tornadoes over trailer parks. They realized they couldn’t do it anymore.

First Baptist Church of Philadelphia was chartered in 1699 with nine members. They held their first meetings in a Sunday morning empty saloon.

As church trustees were considering sale of their facility 314 years later, trustee chair Mary Lynn Williams led a reflection on the church’s nine founding members.

“Sitting around a table with 10 members, we talked about the difference between the church’s first nine and us ‘last nine,’” Williams said. “What were the first nine looking at? The future. Our problem is we kept looking back.

“Our looking backward all the time and our need to preserve this tradition is part of the reason we’re in the shape we’re in. The building was an albatross around our necks.”

First Baptist sold their facility for $2 million to Liberti Church, a young Reformed Church in America congregation that had been renting the sanctuary for nearly two years. Liberti Church promised to raise $10 million to renovate the historic structure, a remodeling that will include a special space for First Baptist to continue to meet there.

As First Baptist struggled to make ends meet, they unloaded some things that once were precious. They sold their Queen Anne silver to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They rented space to a theatre troupe. When the building transaction was complete, they sold their pipe organ to an historic organ trust that will restore it and give it on permanent loan to another historic downtown church.

When survival is uncertain, formerly precious items become ballast.

When staying afloat requires it, they can be tossed overboard.

My son wasn’t trying to stay afloat when he surveyed his crowded attic. But the time had come to go through the boxes he and his wife said they were going to go through when they moved into the house eight years earlier.

We schlepped boxes filled with memories once too precious to part with from the attic to the garage, with only a quick pass through the body scanner that was my daughter-in-law’s eyes to examine contents.

But she was less sentimental this time, pulling some of the music she studied as a child for her six-year-old daughter. Books, pictures, trophies and camp crafts got one more chance to tug the sentimental chord with her. If they didn’t, they were gone. And she was a hard sell.

A quick call to 1-800-Got-Junk cleared the garage. Sorting through sentiment at your church might not be as easy, but as First Baptist Church Philadelphia learned, it’s never too early.

Spring revealed the rough winter it was for people, trees and roads. Since those are three of my favorite things, it was rough for me, too.

At regular intervals the crinkly brown grass on interstate highway medians wears dark scars, muddy tracks, remainders and reminders of drivers’ unfortunate missteps from the firm, sure, asphalt slabs, into the quagmire of the unpaved median.

Sometimes charcoal colored stains left by locked down, smoking tires run to the edge of the asphalt and become muddy tracks in the median. In wettest conditions those tracks were short and quickly grew deep.

When drivers in cars buried in median mud tried to free themselves without aid, their tracks smudged wide and sloppy and the edges are not sharply defined. Their spinning wheels frothed back and forth, leaving a deep, muddy reminder of their anger and futility.

I saw a metal pole marking the sudden stop of a single pair of tracks; all that remained of a highway information sign. Maybe it lifted a mute caution to slow down, or that vision might be limited by fog, or the road could be dangerous when icy. Maybe it said “Put Down the Phone and Drive.”

Sometimes a single track carved a large ellipse where it dipped into the center grass with one wheel before the driver pulled it back onto solid ground.

Several tracks made a big “C” from one side of the interstate, through the grass, weeds and lilies and up onto the other side, heading the opposite direction. You’ve probably seen state troopers make that move, and then turn on their blue lights and double your heart rate until they zip by you, their eyes on the driver who just roared past.

One day I saw an 18-wheeler still in the tracks he made through the muddy ditch on I-85 near Salisbury. A large tree split his tractor cab from the bumper, through the engine compartment clear back to the windshield. I suspect those were that driver’s last tracks.

When snow and ice cover the land, when rain fogs our windshields, when dark nights and glaring lights limit our sight and we shake our heads to stay alert, we want to keep our wheels on the super slab and make no tracks in the median.

But we all make tracks in life. We leave a mark wherever we step, a mark that says we were here, in the right track or the wrong.

Those who come along after us see the tracks we left in the lives of our children. They see our tracks in the workplace, and at church and in the smiles – or despair – of our spouses.

We leave broad, ugly slashing tracks across the green medians of children we abuse. Our careless cutting words scar their tender hearts. The backs of our hands knock them toward the ditch rather than helping to keep them straight and steady.

On the worst days of winter travel, drivers before you wear clear tracks through the slush and leave a dry route to follow. If you stayed in those tracks, you would stay out of the ditch.

We can do that, too, in our children’s lives. We leave dry tracks through icy roads for them when we love our spouses; when we teach them to pray; when we give them the freedom to run to the edge of the cliff, but hold onto their shirttails; when we build their self-esteem by holding high expectations and giving them tasks to accomplish; when our presence at their recitals or athletic events or school meetings verifies our support; when we love them unconditionally through long hair and short, through good grades and bad, through speeding tickets and car wrecks; when their tears fall on our shoulders and not on the floor.

Thank God for the tracks you followed. Ask His strength to leave good tracks behind.

Hot air hung on our shoulders and licked down our backs slippery with sweat during a sultry August day in 1971. I was two months out of high school, two weeks from college and two minutes from life changing news.

I sat with my back against a tree with a few buddies taking a break from cleaning pea combines following the harvest season for Oconomowoc Canning Company in Poynette, WI. While we pressure washed the stink, stems and stains from the huge machines, we all wanted three things from the day – a glass of cold water, a spot of cool shade, and news about the draft lottery being conducted that afternoon.

This was the third year of a lottery to determine in which order 19-year-olds would be drafted into the military. U.S. involvement in the ill-advised war in Vietnam was past its peak – troop levels were just half of the 335,000 of the previous year, but still high.

Several of us were born in 1952 and “Vietnam” was still the big gorilla in any jungle of our thoughts about the future.

The lottery was instituted to provide some level of certainty for young men. Aside from a myriad of deferments available for those in college, in sensitive jobs, ministers, married with children, well connected to a politician, etc., any man from age 19 to 25 lived every day uncertain about whether or not that day’s mail would say “Greetings” from Uncle Sam.

Planning was difficult. Employers were reluctant to hire a draft eligible man. Families with money could keep their sons in college, and graduate school, and post graduate school to keep the draft board at bay. Canada beckoned others.

Of course, this meant the poor, uneducated and least connected – as usual – bore the brunt of service. To level the field President Nixon eliminated the student deferment. A lottery was instituted to provide some semblance of structure, fairness and confidence.

The first lottery included everyone from age 19 to 25. After that, each year’s lottery was for those men turning 19 that year. This provided a basic expectation that if you landed in the first third of the lottery, you would likely be drafted. If you were in the bottom third, you would not be drafted. The high uncertainty level was reduced to only those in the middle third of the lottery.

Lottery mechanics were this: Two bowls were filled with ping-pong balls. The balls in one bowl had written on them a number from one to 366. The balls in the other bowl had written on them one of the days of the year, from January 1 to December 31, including February 29.

A ball was drawn randomly from the date bowl, then matched with a ball drawn from the numbers bowl. People born on that date would be drafted in the order reflected by that number.

Given similar circumstances today the lottery would be broadcast live on every television and mobile device. In 1971 a few radio stations broadcast the numbers in bunches as they were drawn. Learning the numbers was hit or miss, depending on how much you could be tuned into a radio.

Most of us would have to wait until the newspaper came out the next morning to see where our birthday fell on the death depth chart.

That August afternoon a friend pulled up in his car, radio playing. I asked him, “What do you hear about the lottery numbers?”

He said, “They’ve broadcast some, but I can’t remember them. The only one I remember is that December 4 is number one.”

I laughed at his joke.

“How did you know December 4 was my birthday?” I asked.

The shadow that rolled over his face wasn’t from a cloud.

“I don’t know your birthday,” he said. “No kidding, are you December 4?”

I nodded.

“You’re screwed,” he said.

With a word, my friend rewrote my future, as if he’d pulled down a big screen across my world stage like a prop and painted on it was the picture of an entirely different world.

As you see, I survived the new world. I didn’t plan it; didn’t want it; didn’t like it. But once I embraced that world – which somehow morphed into this world – I learned to trust the One who created it. And in that world I found love in the one He created to share my life with me.

Those two treasures – trust and love – are clearly the benefits derived from the moment 44 years ago that I never wanted, that grew into an experience I would never give back.

My dad drove a gas truck for the local farmers cooperative when I was a kid. He delivered bulk fuel to farms for tractors and furnace oil to village dwellers for heat.

In the summer or on a school break dad liked nothing better than for me to go with him on the truck. It wasn’t for any big help I could offer. It was for company, for hours of father/son time that we didn’t often get because he worked long days.

If the farmer was home when we pulled into his yard, he sauntered over to visit with my dad, who was highly regarded in four counties. Visiting so many households, he knew the news  and was a mobile encyclopedia of current scuttlebutt.

Invariably when I hopped down from the cab and popped my little buzz cut head around the corner to unreel the hose, the farmer would call out, as if he was the first to notice or to think it, “See ya brought a helper with ya today, Marv.”

I knew I really wasn’t much help, but the implied compliment buried in that observation never got old. I puffed up a bit each time someone called me my dad’s helper.

I walked quicker and straighter and leaned into pulling the long, heavy hose while trying to act as if it was no effort at all. If I needed to roll an 80-pound liquid gas tank around to the kitchen, I hoped they couldn’t see that it took every ounce of my strength. Dad handled them like they were as light as baseball bats.

Fifty years later, or last week for those of you keeping score at home, I was with dad in Wisconsin. He doesn’t drive the gas truck anymore. In fact, I did the driving.

We went to the county nursing home where dad assists his pastor in a monthly communion service for residents. Dad brings the communion vessels, wafers and Welch’s, which he keeps in a large, plastic, covered bin.

Dad punched the security code, held open the door and I carried the box in for him. A couple of other volunteers were waiting on us to help set up the worship area in the common room.

“See ya brought a helper with ya today, Marv.”

I didn’t see it coming, that line from across the room, or across the decades. But it zinged through the air like William Tell’s arrow splitting the apple atop his son’s head.

I’m still my father’s helper. It’s a role I cherish and a compliment I don’t deserve.

That nine-word phrase bookends my life. The phrase is the same, but everything between the bookends is different.

I’ve grown from a child to middle age, from a kid to a grandfather, from innocent to wary. And although I’ve earned some frameable papers, been to three county fairs and a hog killin’, swam in the ocean and written things that must be said, perhaps the highest compliment I’ve ever been paid and the most important task to which ever I’ve put my hand, is to be my father’s helper.

High drama packs nearly every scene of the 1993 Oscar winner for best picture “Schindler’s List.” It’s the true story of businessman Oskar Schindler ruthlessly profiteering from WW II by using cheap Jewish labor from internment camps in his factory.

Eventually he realizes the ultimate fate of his labor force, as they are reconscripted from the factory to trains heading for extermination ovens at Auschwitz. He scrambles to trade his wealth to save them.

In an exceptional moment near the end, Schindler collapses in pain and regret. Grief overwhelms him, as he finally comprehends how his selfish preoccupation with wealth kept him from saving more lives.

Schindler, a hero only to Jews and drinking buddies before the movie elevated his name, was a war profiteer. An unsuccessful businessman in his native Czechoslovakia, he joined the Nazi party knowing the coming war would make many men rich. He wanted to be one of them.

He worked deals to secure cheap Jewish labor, seduced contracts from German officers and manufactured enamelware, making “more money than any man could spend in a lifetime.”

An opportunist, he sensed the war’s pending finish. Germany was collapsing and Schindler’s labor source was being sent to fuel the ovens in Auschwitz. As he packed his money into trunks to return home, he had a revelation about the real value of his wealth. He could trade it for lives.

Schindler bargained with sadistic camp commandant Amon Goethe to “buy” 1,100 Jews and save them from Auschwitz. Schindler had to transport the Jews to Czechoslovakia, house them and reopen a factory there, all at his expense.

When the war ends seven months later, Schindler is broke. Because he was a war profiteer and collaborator, he must flee the Allies. During goodbyes to his grateful workers, he collapses in grief.

He looks at the car that is to carry him to safety and cries, “Why did I keep this car? I could have bought 10 more people with it.”

He clutches the Nazi party pin on his lapel. “And this gold pin?” he sobs. “Why did I not give it to Goethe? He would’ve given me two people. One at least. One more person.”

And Schindler falls, sobbing, to his knees.

War measures men. It sizes their hearts, weighs their capacity. War searches souls for a seed of greed and nurtures men’s desires in exchange for their soul.

War made Schindler rich beyond his dreams. Then the spotlight of the human cost of war illuminated his deepest recesses. And he realized the frailty, the brief, temporal nature of all that he’d pursued.

In exchange for a few “things,” like dollar bills or a car or a pin, he could purchase life.

In that context, what is “sacrifice?” War redefines it. In the face of threat you do not consider as sacrifice the things you do without to support your tribe’s war effort. It is simply redistribution to a greater good.

When I first wrote about Schindler’s list in 1994, I said we are at war in America. “But it rages mostly undeclared and undetected while we live as in peace,” I said.

But we are not at war for two reasons:

1. As awful, fruitless and unredemptive as is war, it at least focuses effort. And we are totally unfocused on any of the “crises” manufactured by each day’s headlines. Yesterday’s news wraps fish.

2. No one is willing to redistribute a nickel for the tribal good.

Issues like education, health care, more people in prison than in any other country, restless, angry unemployment among the poor, crumbling infrastructure, spending on military that outstrips the next seven nations combined, fatherless homes, family collapse, rebellion, a rising U.S. oligarchy, religious-political strife, a warming earth and hardened battle lines between opposing opinions fragment focus until we just muddle through the days, grateful to collapse behind a locked door and a blaring television set.

We have little time or interest to evaluate our possessions and consider if we own them, or they own us. What gold pin, or car, or house, or boat or vacation trip will we trade for lives? Schindler finally came to the wrenching realization that each dollar he spent on revelry was a dollar no longer available to purchase a life.

What trinket will you trade for a life? Will you put off a new car to shelter a single, pregnant girl who is considering abortion? Will you trade a new suit for a poor family’s groceries? Will you eat beans instead of steak so another family can eat beans instead of nothing? Will you trade an hour to tutor a struggling student?

Schindler’s Jews now have more than 7,000 descendants. Would you trade your trunk of money for such a legacy?

“You know what? You still thinking we your kids!”

Her statement zipped across 3,000 miles of telephone line and a decade of Christmas cards to wet my eye. And wash me back to a Tennessee airport 13 years earlier, to memories of maybe the best thing I’ve ever done.

Her first words when we met were, “Hello. I’m Anh.”

“Great!” I thought. “She knows English!” But this 18-year-old woman/child with raven black, steam rolled hair had just recited her entire vocabulary.

It was 1979 and Anh La and her trailing 20-year-old brother Xuan, wide-eyed refugees from a Viet Nam that held no hope for them, had just arrived in the United States. My wife, Sue Ellen and I were their sponsors.

Viet Nam still struggled to recover from the political and social chaos of war and reunification. Thousands of South Vietnamese fled in crowded, leaking boats for refugee camps in bordering countries. Those who made it safely past pirates and through hazardous open seas often waited years for someone in America, Australia, Britain or France to sponsor them, to agree to help settle them in a new country with a job and housing.

With little understanding of what it meant or what it might require, Sue Ellen and I raised our hands.

Anh and Xuan came, speaking little English, but with a written command learned in camps. They stayed a week in our home while we helped them find work and an apartment. At night we studied language, bus travel, grocery stores and the practical hurdles to step over in American life.

We got out the piggy bank and made change, read cereal boxes and newspapers and laughed together at Xuan’s fascination with “The Hulk” on television. After a couple weeks he grew bored with “The Hulk” and television generally because every day it was, “same, same.”

They loved our little baby and struggled to tell us of their family in Viet Nam that was now in danger because Anh and Xuan had successfully escaped. Because of their small physical stature, innocence and wonder, Sue Ellen and I felt like adult rescuers to their “lost children,” even thought we were only a few years older.

One night Anh and Xuan babysat for us. When we returned the kitchen was clean and the supper dishes washed and put away. But we couldn’t find the dishes. Anh directed us to the dishwasher where she had stored the clean dishes after washing them in the sink. She had seen Sue Ellen take clean dishes out of there to set the table, so Anh assumed that was their storage place.

Anh and Xuan made it in America. After less than a year, they moved to Ohio to be with a sister who had been resettled there. Then they all moved to California to a more familiar climate and a large population of Asians.

They worked hard, secured good jobs and started businesses. Eventually they sponsored and resettled their parents and they’ve raised their own children who are now in college. They came to our baby’s wedding.

One of Anh’s daughters – whom I’ve not met in person – wrote me a note when she graduated from high school. “Thank you for making my life possible,” she said.

That note is a treasure to me, glistening greater than the gold in Aladdin’s cave. It affirmed to me that sponsoring Anh and Xuan was probably the best thing we’ve ever done.

What significant event, achievement, or risk successfully concluded do you declare, “The best thing I ever did?”

For many of us, a lot of years have passed since that event. Perhaps the effort demanded more of us than we can muster again. Perhaps we think having done it once, we’ve done enough.

But do you remember the joy in its doing, the enormous satisfaction? Remember how you feel best about yourself when you’ve accomplished something for others?

Remember the best thing you ever did?

Why not do it again?

This interesting article in Baptist News Global relates a survey among American Christians asking how we order the many identities which we all carry — family, faith, country, job, etc.

In our confined, enclosed sanctuaries inside of which we share our lives and encourage each other in the faith, we easily say we put faith atop our list — that our first identity is as a Christian. In the open ended, outside-the-church survey done by Barna, there is a disturbing — to me — trend for American Christians to identify themselves first as Americans.

As we approach Easter — the most important, time searing, earth shuddering event in human history — I’m reminded of Peter, who chose to shed his identity as a follower of “that Galilean” in favor of anonymity. Any identity we claim for ourselves ahead of the brand burned into our soul as followers of Christ diminishes our proclamation that Jesus is first in our lives.

Are we Americans? Yes, and likely proudly so. Are we parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, soul mates, best buddies? Yes and happily so. Are we carpenters, lawyers, salesmen, nurses, teachers, brick layers? Yes, and gratefully so. Do we belong to a political party, Kiwanis, Rotary, Boy Scouts? Sure.

But, who and what are we first? Putting something first means you will measure the value of everything that falls later on your list against that which is at the top. If your professional identity is first, then there really is no conflict when you miss an anniversary or your kids’ events in favor of more time at the office.

If your first identity is as an American, then there is no conflict to support a national policy that may conflict with the words of Jesus to “love your enemies” or that ignores care for widows and orphans or that persecutes strangers in your midst, even though you once were a stranger.

If your first identity is as a family person, there is no conflict to leave work early to attend a child’s event, or to arrange a surprise for your husband. There is no conflict to withhold contributions to the church in favor of a family vacation.

You see where all of this leads. What is your first identity? If someone asks, “Who are you?” or says upon meeting, “Tell me about yourself,” with what identity do you start?

Peter in the courtyard started with what he was not: “I don’t know this man you’re talking about.” (Mark 14:71)

May we top our own list of identifying factors with the proud proclamation that “I am a follower of Jesus the Christ.” When that conviction becomes the organizing principle of your life other identities and priorities will fall into a clarifying order.

In the wonderful, compelling, memoir “Same kind of different as me” a rich art dealer is nudged by his simple, sincere, servant wife to begin serving the evening meal once a week at the Union Gospel Mission in Fort Worth, Texas.

His wife Deborah has had vision about a poor man rising to lead the city. When a homeless man named Denver shuffles eyes down through the meal line, she realizes with a start, “That’s him!” She encourages Ron, her reluctant husband, to befriend Denver.

It takes months because the distance between their universes is light years.

Denver was born and raised a sharecropper in Louisiana, a modern slave. He could not read or write, never attended school a day in his life. He never even knew there was such a thing as a school that he was missing.

One day when he was 23 he just left the plantation, still in debt to “the man” for the clothes on his back and for rent on his two-room, windowless shack that had no plumbing or electricity. He caught a slow freight train to California.

With the help of hobos and homeless, he learned to survive by panhandling, or feigning a “hamburger drop” in which he would scrounge through a garbage can for a hamburger he’d put there earlier. When a likely “donor” approached, he would pull the burger out and start eating, a revolting sight that compelled the approaching mark to say, “Don’t eat that! Here is some money, get a real meal.”

He eventually migrated back to Fort Worth where Ron, over time, reached out him. They went to eat, shared coffee, even toured some art museums and hung out. Street wise and guarded, Denver finally asked Ron, “What do you want from me?”

Ron said he simply wanted Denver to be his friend. Denver asked for a couple days to think about it.

When next they sat over coffee, Denver said he’d learned of a curious white man’s practice of fishing. While a poor black man is proud of everything he catches, takes it home and makes it a meal, he’s learned that white men sometimes throw their catch back into the water. They call it “catch and release.”

If Ron was interested in a “catch and release” friendship in which he reaches out to secure Denver’s friendship, and releases Denver once he’s gained it, then Denver was not interested in being a friend.

If, however, Ron was interested in a forever friend – a mutual, supportive friendship through thick and thin – then he would like to be Ron’s friend.

It is a moving scene in a riveting, true story.

Denver recognized that some who strive to “do good” might be crossing social barriers to notch a credit, or gain a good feeling, only to realize the energy and commitment required to maintain a friendship across boundaries is too great. And they release it.

Are we willing to cross social barriers to “catch” a soul for Christ, but then “release” the person after we’ve witnessed to him or her because the burden of actually being a friend is more than we intended?

While North America creaks in the throes of a seeping, penetrating cold snap rare in its intensity, sights like a frozen pond in North Carolina push me down the zip line of memory to my childhood playing hockey on ponds in Wisconsin.

Every culture has rites of passage and one of them for me was opening a gift to find my first pair of ice skates on a Christmas morning. I couldn’t wait to slip on my coat and boots, slosh through the snow, slide under the fence and slog over to the wide spot in the creek to teach myself to skate. How hard could it be?

My parents stayed in the warm house and simply urged me to be sure the ice was thick enough to support my sisters and me. Well, how thick is safe?

And how do I determine thickness?

With an ax we chopped a hole close enough to the edge that we could leap to solid ground if the ice was too thin. Hmm, seemed safe. After a few tentative steps toward the middle, listening for ominous cracking, then some cautious jumps up and down without falling through, we were certain.

I discovered it is very difficult to stand up on ice skates. But my ankles lasted long enough to encourage me and we later frequented a much larger pond. Some winters it would snow during the first deep freeze, leaving the surface crunchy and worthless for skating.

On good years my buddies Dennis, Jay and I would shovel off a large area, tie magazines around our shins to protect them from whacks and play some hockey. Usually we were so tired from shoveling that the eventual hockey game was short.

When other kids found our snow-free patch of pond, they quickly gathered to take advantage, a theft of our labor we greatly resented.

If the ice was really thick we could use a tractor and blade to clear rink space. One winter our neighbor took us onto the pond in his car. We spun around totally out of control – but relatively safe – sliding effortless and quietly across the flat, clear ice.

In the winter of the really big freeze, it was far too cold to be outside for anything other than emergencies. My dad drove a fuel truck then for the local farmer’s cooperative. Of course, people were running out of heating fuel faster than normal and way ahead of schedule. So dad suffered through enormously long days in -50 degree wind chill.

I’m amazed his truck would start on those mornings. He kept it sheltered between sheds but the engine still screeched and complained when asked to turn over. Lubrication hardened in the oil pan, so metal rubbed metal briefly, creating the ruckus.

Temperatures like that freeze your nose hairs and crystallize your breath into icicles on your eyelashes. It’s literally too cold to snow.

But when it did snow we wrapped chains around the tires for traction. Snowplows shoved snow off the roads, filling up ditches. When the ditches were full snow blowers spewed snow over the top creating walls of heavy drifts. Driving was as if through a tunnel and intersections became exercises in risk management.

Of course the snow of memories is always deeper; the temperatures always colder; circumstances always more dire. My dad remembers working for a dairyman who could not afford a milk bucket. So dad had to ferry milk from the barn to the dairy one handful at a time; uphill; both ways.

I suspect our children’s eventual memories of how they survived the deep freeze of 2015 will grow with time and fill their children with awe over how they foiled fear and fate and survived in the face of all odds.

When a man who bought a house for the value of its unpaid taxes noticed that the previous owner’s car remained on the property, he asked Sandy Run, SC deputies to investigate.

Inside, they discovered the body of Mary Sue Merchant, 74. She had died of natural causes – 18 months earlier.

Civic and utility workers had done their duty. They’d cut off her electricity for non-payment. I’m sure they sent her a notice before they did so. Then, they sold her property at auction when her taxes went unpaid.

But no one talked to her.

Merchant was a widow, had no children and had lost touch with her sister long before. Her husband – who died years earlier – was a retired prison guard who feared retribution from prisoners, so they lived quietly and reclusively.

The awful sadness is, as the sheriff said in a 2009 Associated Press story, “This lady had absolutely nobody who cared enough to check on her.”

Earlier that same year a 93-year-old man froze to death inside his Bay City, MI home. Bay City Electric Light & Power had recently installed a device to restrict Marvin Schur’s electricity use because the chronically late payer owed about $1,000. The device would shut off electricity when the bill reached a certain point and could only be reset by the homeowner. No one told Schur it had been installed and he slowly froze to death in his unheated home.

A neighbor who found Schur dead said his windows were covered with ice – on the inside.

Investigation later showed he had money to pay the bills. He just hadn’t.

A surveillance camera video a few years ago became a YouTube hit when it showed 78-year-old pedestrian Angel Torres struck by a car and flipped upside down while trying to cross a street in Hartford, Conn. He was left severely injured and motionless in the middle of the road as cars passed and bystanders watched. One motorcycle driver circled, looked, and drove off. A few drivers called 911, but no one stopped to help.

Have we become so calloused, so self-absorbed that people live and die in quiet desperation all around us with no one even knowing if they’re dead? Or if they ever lived?

You cannot be responsible for the world. But you can take the initiative to know your neighbors, their names, their situations, whether or not they have someone who cares if they live or die.

That could be a good senior adult ministry for your church: to create a daily calling circle for people who live alone, to check in on them, let them know someone cares, to help if the utilities get cut off or the cupboard is bare.

One day you will call and no one will answer. But your friend will have lived every day knowing she was not alone.