How was your Sunday Service?©

How was your Sunday Service? Mine was a little bit different. Let me tell you about it.

About 8:30 Sunday morning my phone rang, it was my son, David. “Are you feeling adventurous this morning, dad?” was his question. I replied “It depends on what you have in mind.” He explained that he had just gotten a call from a caregiver in distress in Moultrie, GA., about 110 miles southwest of us.

So here we go. I’m going to give you a little snippet of what it takes to look after seniors like us in middle Georgia.

David was on call for the weekend, (taking care of seniors is a 24/7 business and all calls have to be taken and dealt with,) and the caregiver who called had just finished an all night shift and was ready to go home except her car couldn’t be driven. The serpentine belt (fan belt for you old timers) was shredded and needed to be replaced. That means she had no alternator to charge the battery, no power steering, and no water pump to keep the engine from overheating. And it was Sunday morning with no shops open and no one to turn to for help, except David.

So David’s proposed “Adventure” was for the two of us to gather our tools, go to O’Reilly to hopefully buy the right belt (6 ribbed wide by 88 1/16 inches long), drive a couple hours to Moultrie and replace the caregiver’s serpentine belt on her car which was in the client’s driveway.

We had a few choices:

1. Tell her to wait until Monday morning when she could call a tow truck to take her to a shop that would probably charge a couple hundred dollars, or

2. Call a family member or friend to see if they could help, or

3. Drive to Moultrie ourselves to do it.

So what should I do… continue getting dressed for church or put on my overalls and go to Moultrie? Well, the motto on the office wall is The Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would like to be treated”. I hated to miss church but sometimes, when a caregiver is in distress, even on Sunday morning, you have to come to her rescue. That’s my loose paraphrase of Luke 14:5 which says “…so Jesus took the man and healed him and let him go. Then he said to them, “If an ass or a cow belonging to one of you fell into a well, wouldn’t you rescue him without the slightest hesitation even though it were the Sabbath?” So, the decision was made for us when we hung that motto on the wall: off to Moultrie it was.

I changed clothes, headed to O’Reilly’s where they had the right belt in inventory and then to David’s with the toolbox and off to Moultrie we went.

About two hours later we pulled into the driveway to see a much relieved caregiver with her car hood open in the driveway. After about 45 minutes of wrestling the old belt off and the new one into place, the car started, the belt stayed on and did its job and the caregiver had a big smile on her face.

Another two hours home and we pulled into David’s driveway. That was our “Sunday Service” and it was a good one. I hope yours was too.

Thanks for reading All About Seniors… see you next week!

PS, That’s how you care for seniors in Middle Georgia.

Bill Milby is a Director of Visiting Angels® of Central Georgia, a non-medical, living assistance service for seniors. If you have questions or comments about this column you can reach him at william.mercylink@gmail.com or search for us at https://www.facebook.com/VisitingAngelsofCentralGA

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