Wednesday, March 19 On August 29, 2005 one of the deadliest and most destructive hurricanes crashed into the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc from Florida to Texas but was especially deadly to New Orleans and the surrounding coastal cities. Nearly 2,000 persons were killed and 81 billion dollars of damage was caused by Katrina. The rebuilding would take years. One year after the disaster I took a group of youth from BridgeView United Methodist Church in Norman to Biloxi, Mississippi where we assisted in rebuilding homes alongside Habitat for Humanity. I still remember so vividly the destruction we witnessed along the Gulf Coast. Our eyes could not believe what we were seeing. There were steel billboards along the highway that had been twisted like candy canes, huge trees that had been completely uprooted, large sailboats that had been swept away from their moorings and now rested far from the shore. One boat we saw was lodged in a large tree. It was hard to imagine the force of nature that could cause such damage. Some of our youth expressed dismay and wondered out loud how could a loving God allow this to happen? I remember pulling into Gulfport/Biloxi and wondering how the people who had suffered this punch to the gut would react. Would they be angry at God? Would they doubt His goodness as some of our youth seemingly were doing? We stayed at a Methodist church in Biloxi that was housing several teams of volunteers from churches everywhere. I will never forget the goodness our hosts exhibited towards us and all the volunteers who had come to help rebuild. Despite the fact some had lost homes and even a few had lost loved ones, these folks still believed in God’s steadfast love and found hope in the dawn of each new day. They certainly didn’t believe God had caused this destruction and instead saw God’s hand at work in all the people who had come from hundreds of miles away to lend a hand. Each day they got up before we did and prepared breakfast for us to eat before we left for our work sites. Then many of them joined us at the sites to rebuild the homes of their neighbors. They truly did Seize the Day as they made the most of a new beginning. One day I remember one of our hosts quoting from Revelation 21, “See, I am making all things new.” In the midst of chaos and the smell of decay they had learned the lesson that God fills us with His Holy Spirit and allows us to begin again. God can take the worst of situations and transform it into something good just as He did on Easter after Christ was crucified on Good Friday. Our youth and I learned important lessons on this mission trip in the summer of 2006. We did something good in helping to build a new home. More than that we saw firsthand how people can pick themselves up and move forward after a terrible disaster. We learned that with God the worst thing is never the last thing. Rev. David Poteet, Associate Pastor
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 19:00:01 +0000
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