Love Thy Neighbor

What would you do for your neighbor?  Pick up their mail?  Take in their trash cans?  Water their plants?  How about spending 2 Saturdays working to replace their leaky roof in 90 degree weather?  That’s exactly what a group of volunteers from Cary-Grove Neighborhood Life did for a family in Cary in the middle of June.

Jim and Mia Podzimek were devastated and didn’t know what they were going to do when a roofing contractor took their deposit money last fall and never came back.  All they knew is that their roof was leaking and they now had no money to get it replaced.  Mark Ennis from Jim and Mia’s local church, St. Peter and Paul in Cary, learned about their situation and was set on finding help.  Mark had recently attended a quarterly Men’s Ecumenical Breakfast sponsored by CGNL and heard about their Love Thy Neighbor Team.  The team, led by Doug Parker and Andrew Dimino, organizes and leads volunteers to do minor repairs for single mothers, widows, elderly and families in the Cary-Grove Area who are in need.  Mark approached the team with the problem.

“I recalled thinking ‘A roof?  That’s big!  I don’t like being on roofs.” says Andrew, remembering that first conversation.  “We had no real funding for something that big, but when God puts something like that in front of you, you have to have faith that the resources will be there as well.  I had one person in mind that I knew was a roofer, but you can’t do a roof with one person.  Little did I know that Doug was a roofer in college as his son Alex had done roofing as a summer job.” 

It took some time, but the team brought together the financial resources through the Extension Ministries of Willow Creek and the St. Vincent DePaul Society from St Peter and Paul, two of their partner churches,  and combined those with some private donors and they had a budget.

A series of e-mails and calls to the volunteer list and a crew was established.  Material was delivered and on Saturday June 18^th, the work began.  Eight volunteers worked from 8 a.m. till about 5 p.m.  .  Jim and Mia’s son and 2 grandsons even pitched in.  The following Saturday, we had 9 volunteers and worked the full day finishing up the roof.  The Community Relations team from Cary-Grove EV Free church provided coffee, donuts, lunch and lots of water.

When asked why a teenager would give up two Saturdays to do some tough work helping someone he didn’t even know, Alex Parker simply said, “It was worthy.”

In a letter to Cary Grove Neighborhood Life, Mia expressed that “a million Thank You’s would not ever be enough to show my gratitude for all that Cary Grove Neighborhood Life has done to help me and my family…Because of the miracle they have experienced Jim and Mia feel a need to pay it forward… and experience the giving.” They have added their names to the volunteer list to help out on future Love Thy Neighbor and CGNL Projects. 

Cary-Grove Neighborhood Life is a non-profit organization partnering with 5 local churches and several organizations in the Cary-Grove area.