I am coming to a critical stage in the development of my back porch. It is getting very near the point of inhabitability.

The floor is in place, the stairs on both sides are built and in use and all my safety rails are built. The roof is covered with plywood and tar paper and the walkways are clear of construction debris.

Now is the time when I have the danger of letting things slide to catch up on other tasks and neglecting to finish the job in a timely matter.

While I was building the porch, I also decided to go ahead and put some new siding on the back of the house on the wall under the porch roof. I bought two new vinyl windows for the task, which will give me a net gain of one window. I have one of them installed in its frame, but the other still awaits my attention.

I also have torn off the old siding and stuff, but have yet to put the new stuff back up in its place. As with any job, this one seems to go on and on.

I spent most of the day Saturday getting the main steps built. They are three feet wide and there are five steps, not including the ground or the step onto the porch. It took me a long time to get everything dug out and leveled, especially since I had to remove three rocks from the ground there that weighed several hundred pounds. Luckily, all three were somewhat flat, so I might be able to use them to make some sort of a walkway. I've always been partial to rocks for making a walkway.

As I was saying, I'm coming to the point where only a short list of things remains to be done, from adding a few more cross braces to the roof to attaching the lattice work to the rails on the stairs. As I noted earlier, the front of the house was all finished except for the siding for nearly nine months before I finally finished up. I don't intend on letting this job go on forever. Of course, intentions don't drive nails.

Fall is coming on quickly and I still have potatoes to dig, a garden to clean out, a chicken coop to seal and firewood to cut and stack. Oh yeah, and I still haven't used the string trimmer on the weeds behind the house, either.

That's what happened to the huge living room job I had to do: It stalled out in the face of all the other pressing matters. However, in that instance, I had to pay a fellow to help me, so I at least worked whenever he could show up. The last time I saw him, he borrowed $100 to pay his light bill and I haven't seen him since.

That's been at least eight months or so ago, so I don't expect him to show up anytime soon with money in his hand. If he had money, he would have paid his own light bill to start with.

Of course, when I tried to call him a little later to work something out, his phone had been disconnected. Well, at least the electricity was still on for at least one more month.

When I help someone like that, I try to do it expecting that the person won't pay me back.

I've written about this topic before, ad nauseum, I suppose. The point is, it's always better to do a good deed without an ulterior motive or suspicion, so when I assume the loan is a gift, I'm not disappointed or upset when whomever it is doesn't return the favor.

Besides, freedom from having to try to hunt someone down and collect or even having to try to get them to work off the debt is worth something to me. If they can live with it, so can I.

In relationships of any kind, the worse thing we can do is place our expectations in front of the good we can do from helping people. If folks don't live up to our expectations, we shouldn't hold that against them. They aren't the ones that made the rules—often they don't even know what the rules are and they didn't even agree to play the game to start with. They just asked for help.

Usually I feel disappointed when people don't do what I wanted or expected them to do, and angry when they don't do what they say they will do. But it's better to throw the expectations out the window and learn to accept people for who and what they are, not for what we expect them to be. Until we do that, we'll never learn to love people the way we're called to love them.

Don't think that makes it easy. When someone is doing or saying things that aren't very comely, it's awfully hard to look past those traits and see the real person behind the bad behavior. But that's exactly what my life instruction manual says I must do. I do say 'no' from time to time. I try to help people if I can, but I don't let myself become a welcome mat.

One thing I've noticed is that people who owe me money seem to disappear from my life, which also can be a good thing. No one ever calls and gives a report, like, "I really appreciate you loaning me that money, but I've fallen on hard times and I can't pay you back right now. Is there something I can do to make things right?" Now that would be what I would expect, but there again, I've tried hard to keep my expectations from getting in my way.

How I got so sidetracked here is beyond my ability to explain, so I'll just leave it at that.

I suppose I was trying to point out that the work on the back porch might have gone faster had I hired someone to help me do it and that my usual worker and I aren't exactly communicating. There are some things that just go better when you have help. For instance, climbing up and down a ladder to fetch things is harder than having someone hand the materials up.

But, I have more control of my job if I work alone and I know what's going to happen and that each thing done will meet my 'expectations.' Those jokers are hard to weed out.

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