Too Much and Just Enough

For me, the story of the flood always comes down to two words: too much.

Too much rain led to too much horror, too much sorrow, too much loss. But then, so much love flooded the city it deposited a nearly overwhelming tide of volunteers, donations and prayers.

That's where we came in, volunteers at the East Nashville Salvation Army nearly a full month after Nashville's historic flooding.

The facility's entire gym was stacked high with donations: crates of water bottles, towers of diapers, more toothbrushes than it seemed a city could use in a lifetime. It was too much, just like everything else about the flood had been.



Our job was to tame the chaos and organize the bounty into manageable boxes, to help get the donations to those in need. The gym needed to become a gym again, because life goes on, and summer programs were starting for local kids.

So we sorted through giant, immovably heavy boxes filled with shampoo bottles, bars of soap, tubes of toothpaste and more. We marveled at the sheer number of each kind of item, the minutiae of daily life suddenly writ large through the generosity of strangers.

Getting through a single giant box was a challenge, but by the end of the day, with hands sticky from sorting soaps and lotions, we had sorted through dozens.



We got a lot done, but of course it wasn't enough. How could it be? We left, exhausted, with work still undone, yawning boxes still waiting.

But life goes on nonetheless. The gym will be a gym again, and Nashville will be a whole city again. It's still too much, but somehow it's just enough.