Hot Water

I love trips to Home Depot, especially when they are to meet volunteers to buy things for NeighborLink recipients they’re helping. Today was one of those days. 

These volunteers met an older couple who had a hot water heater go out recently and decided to help. This group of volunteers have some skilled electricians and do hot water heaters pretty regularly. After talking to these volunteers about the life situation of this couple, I found out that they’ve been without hot water for 2 months! They’ve also been stuck in the hospital most of the past few months due to the husband having 3 strokes pretty close together. 

                       

Today reminded me of a few things.

1. I take hot water for granted and cannot imagine being in a position where I couldn’t replace mine if it went out. Unfortunately, I’m reminded of this fact often because we seem to do quite a few hot water heaters each year. We’ve already done 2 in 6 weeks.

2. Life is pretty fragile and at any moment we could be in a position where we’re fighting for our lives. Healthy support structures and relationships are key to life.

3. The community needs organizations like NeighborLink and many others that serve people when life gets hard. More importantly, the community needs those that are healthy and have resources to support these organizations regularly. Without the generosity of organizations like Home Depot and our financial supporters, we wouldn’t have been able to buy this $300 water heater today and this family would have gone even longer without hot water. 

If you’re like to offset the cost of this $300 hot water heater, please donate. 

Thanks Home Depot for a $2,500 grant over a year ago. It helped over 10 NeighborLink projects, including this one. Also, thanks for the $75 discount today on this hot water heater. That’s $75 that will go to the next project.