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I spent all day Thursday with three good friends and it was one of the worst days of my life.
We were finally able to get into New Orleans and begin the process of checking on our churches. Freddie Arnold from our associational office had secured a pass that got us past police checkpoints, and with Ed Jelks and his wife Glenda (I told you previously he is a church builder for the state convention), we spent the day visiting over twenty churches.
I've been worrying about how to tell this. We confined our visits to Orleans Parish, the portion of our city which is officially New Orleans. We drove down deserted streets with no traffic lights, with destruction on both sides, downed trees everywhere, homes boarded up, every store and every business closed. Not some and not most. Every last one. From the time we entered New Orleans at 9:30 am until we moved into Metairie over 7 hours later, we did not see one place to buy a coke or go to the rest room.
No birds were singing. One or two stray cats showed up and ran away. We saw an occasional worker cutting trees or stringing electrical lines. I think we saw a homeowner or two working in their yards, but nothing more. The silence was eerie. This is a major city populated by hundreds of thousands of people, but none were around.
Every house and business wore racing stripes, lines to indicate where the water had risen and stopped, then lingered. Lines placed there by the filth and ugliness carried in the water. The fortunate homes wore their lines low; most sported them like belts, at mid-level or even higher.
Boats were scattered everywhere. The water was gone, but the boats remained. Good boats, many with motors in place and supplies lying on the floor, just sitting there, by the side of the street or under the interstate. I suppose anyone who wanted one could hitch up to it and drive away. We saw life vests discarded, and debris and refuse washed into corners by the fences. And the libraries. Have you ever seen a library after a flood? Not a pretty sight. Books that have been mutilated and desecrated and muddied and ruined forever, scattered across the floor. Mildew and mold on the loyal volumes still holding their position on the shelves. Dark, dank, depressing.
And now the churches. You wanted to know about the churches, and I have stalled too long.
"I had the opportunity to share the gospel with Harry Connick, Jr! He was terrific."
"I've been interviewed on 'All Things Considered' about what our church is doing. I got e-mails from people all over the country saying 'I can't believe they let you say those things on public radio.' But they did. I had the opportunity to preach the gospel to the nation."
"I've been asked to write an article on this story for Baptist Press." "I've been interviewed on Moody Radio twice." "Here, Joe, read this story in the paper about what our church is doing."
You just have to understand that these pastors, the ones excitedly telling how God is opening doors, have sat here in New Orleans basically ignored for years. You're just doing the Lord's work, leading your church,trying to get it right, sometimes seeing little fruit for your labors. Then, suddenly, Katrina storms in and a reporter for the largest newspaper in the Midwest shows up to interview you. National Public Radio calls. You have opportunities you have only dreamed of. Your community lines up at your church doors asking for your help.
You have longed to see this day come. To your amazement, it came on the heels of a tragic storm that took the lives of perhaps a thousand of our citizens and devastated perhaps 50,000 homes. God working in a tragedy.
Tuesday, Ed Jelks and I rode throughout the West Bank area of metro New Orleans in his huge truck with "Official Disaster Team" emblazoned on the doors. Ed is a church builder, a construction specialist with the Louisiana Baptist Convention, and a legend in this state. He and I visited twenty of our Baptist churches.
We saw them in every condition--from fully mobilized, excitedly ministering to their communities, parking lots crammed with long trucks of supplies and RVs for volunteers, yellow t-shirted workers everywhere, lines of cars streaming in--everything from that to the other extreme: churches that appear untouched since the storm blew through. Grass knee-deep, shingles that once covered the roof now protecting the yard, a window out here, the roof leaking there.
And the stories we heard.
"These are from the Baptists of North Carolina. And look--they put enough canned goods for a family in separate boxes, so all we have to do is hand it out." Each box contained fifty dollars worth of groceries.
Pastor Todd Hallman of Luling's First Baptist Church was showing me the storeroom where his people were handing out food and water to the people of St. Charles Parish. They've been on the job since only a few days after Katrina went through.
"Need a refrigerator?" he said. "I said, 'Yes! Don't tell me you're giving those out too?" He said, "Look at this." Stacks of motel-room-sized refrigerators lined a hallway. "Where did you ever get these?"
Todd said, "I found out through the Purpose-Driven network that a Hilton Hotel in California was upgrading, so we asked them what they planned to do with the old fridges. They sent us forty-two." Since the one we ordered from Home Depot will not be delivered for another eight days, I took one. When we no longer need it, I promise to pass it along.
Margaret and I re-entered our home in the New Orleans western suburb of River Ridge Saturday night at 6:30 pm, precisely four weeks and two hours and a half since we fled Katrina. I revisited our house two days after Labor Day for an hour to retrieve some clothes and check on things, and I thought I knew what to expect on returning. Not quite.
FEMA has been here. They patched my roof with blue plastic to keep the rain from doing further damage. Since Rita dumped more rain on this area over the weekend, this is no little gift. They also left my front door unlocked, a scary thought, although as far as I can tell, we've had no losses.
Mold and mildew now decorate the walls of our den and the kitchen ceiling. The grass outside has not been cut in a month and the back fence is down, due mainly to the neighbor's tree presently squatting across it. These are minor things. Some of our friends lost everything. Nothing that follows is meant to diminish my concern for their losses or to exaggerate our own suffering. Most of our pain is of the small variety, the kind that nags at you and eats away at your equilibrium. Like the fellow said, "I feel like I'm being eaten alive by a school of minnows."
The first order after moving our bags into the house was moving the refrigerator and freezer out onto the lawn and cleaning them out. We have lots of company in this unpleasant chore. Drive down any street in this part of the world and you may have your pick of hundreds of nice looking appliances in every price range. Slightly used, of course, and forever soiled and spoiled by the decay and fermentation that occurs to organic material when left to nature without the retarding influence of ice or freon.
How shall I describe the experience of cleaning out these units?
I wonder if the frustration my family and I are experiencing is being repeated throughout evacuation-land?
All week long, we have been occupying suite 104 of the Quality Inn in Ozark, Alabama, where we traveled to last Saturday in order to preach a revival meeting at Ridgecrest Baptist Church this week. Pastor Jim Hill said what we were thinking, that God knew about Katrina even when we all made these plans and we should go forward. Now that the event is almost over, I'm more certain than ever that he's right.
Frustration, we're told, is defined as having one's goals blocked. If my goal has been to be in the thick of things back at home in New Orleans--or at least in the parts of the metro area we can get into, and it certainly is--then, I've been frustrated. I know not to second-guess decisions once they are made, but knowing it with your head and not doing it with your heart are separate things. The folks here have treated us royally, not like refugees but as brother and sister come to do the work of the Father among them, yet at every spare moment, I've been on the computer or cell phone with our pastors and other workers, trying to do anything I can to encourage or inform.
Today, my computer went out.
I'm urging anyone who asks not to rush back home into the New Orleans area. While the various city and parish leaders seem to be inviting residents to return, the FEMA director says not so fast. He cautions there is not enough clean water, not enough stores open, and that things are still not up and running sufficiently to take care of hundreds of thousands of citizens coming home.
If you are where you can stay another week, please try to do so.
My brother Ron sent me a weird article from someone who called himself an eyewitness of all the ugliness of the evacuees. This fellow had decided to volunteer in Houston, and after receiving a brief tour of the Astrodome, he stood outside handing out bottles of water to evacuees coming off the endless buses that were arriving from New Orleans. He was offended that few said thank you, and that many preferred a coke or a beer. Then as he did other labors, he was horrified to see the New Orleanians being harsh and demanding and selfish. The conclusions he came to--using ugly profanity and racial epithets--seemed to justify his own mean spirit and his bigotry.
When the New Orleans ministers met in Jackson, Mississippi, last Wednesday, Ken Taylor (professor at the seminary and pastor of Elysian Fields Baptist Church) said, "I've been preaching through John's Gospel. And my next sermon--the one that was canceled when we all fled the storm--was to be from John 11. The resurrection."
You cannot be a serious follower of Jesus Christ and not believe in resurrection.
Resurrections come in all shapes and sizes. Someone has asked that I tell you about the time God gave one to our family.
When I was thirteen, our house burned. That in itself was awful, but it came at the worst time in our lives. Two years earlier, the coal mines in West Virginia had shut down, Dad was laid off, and we moved into my widowed grandmother's house in rural Alabama. Unable to find work there, Dad farmed. Once in a while, he got a few days' work in a push mine, a home-made tunnel that was as primitive as anything from the 1800s, dangerous and dark and poor paying. Trying to feed and clothe a family of six children, one takes what he can get.
The feeding came easily; we lived on a farm. The clothing was the hard part. The shoes I was wearing had long since worn out, but there was no choice but to wear them on. We had moved across the hill to an uncle's vacant house, four rooms it was, so you can imagine how crowded we were. I had no coat, and in the winter when I stood waiting for the bus in short sleeves, I would say, 'I'm hot natured. Can't stand coats.' Kids can be such liars. My brother Ron was graduating from high school that year and they had scraped the money together to find him a graduating suit. Then, on that February, 1954, day some coals must have rolled out of the open grate and onto the wood floor. Dad had gone to Jasper and Mom was across the hill at Granny's house. We were all in school.
It was like a death. You thought you were as low as it was possible to get, then someone found a way to go lower. As we stood around the smoldering remains, Ron said, "Mom, did you save my suit?" She said, "Son, we didn't save anything." So we all cried.
I've promised my wonderful son Marty that I'll slow down the rate of these articles in a day or so. This log is like a daily radio program I once had: you think of something fascinating to say and you have a great outlet. Once the outlet dries up, you no longer get the ideas. I'm confident there is a law of nature involved here.
The folks who work in our associational office are about to get paid. Stand outside on a clear morning and you can hear the hallelujahs. Since we use paper checks (remember them?) and they were in our office on Lakeshore Drive in New Orleans, our wonderful computer guy Louis James has been working with Whitney Bank to set us up with automated payroll deposits, and it's finally about to happen. My credit card company will be so happy to see me coming. (My line over the past few weeks was: "I don't have a lot of money, but I have great credit." That worked until I found out the card was maxed out. First time for everything, they say, and this was mine.)
Wednesday, at the First Baptist Church of Jackson, around 20 of us preachers from New Orleans assembled. Paul drove over from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Ken and Charlie and Chris from Northwest Alabama, Keith and his son Keith from Ocean Springs, MS, several from throughout Mississippi, and a number from Louisiana. We learned that Alberto and Cosme had stayed in a shelter with their families for a few days, but are comfortably situated in Brookhaven at the moment. All of them needed the fellowship, needed to hear assurances that God's people--all of them, Baptist members, our denominational leaders, everyone--is going to help them once we are able to return. Scott Smith is back at Highland Baptist Church in Metairie. "We had services there last Sunday," he said. Oh? How many were in attendance? "Two."
Yesterday, a number of us met in Hammond, Louisiana, at the North Shore Associational office to begin laying plans for "Adopt-A-Church," the plan to match New Orleans churches up with sponsoring congregations all over the country.
I think the storm was still raging when Roger Freeman, pastor of Clarksville, Tennessee's First Baptist Church, sent me an email suggesting that we partner churches in his state with New Orleans churches. I thought it was a great idea, and made special sense coming from Roger, who pastored New Orleans' First Baptist Church in the late 80s into the mid-90s. He knows and loves our city and these churches. The editor of the state paper was working with Roger on this partnership.
A couple of days later, I began to hear that other states were thinking of the same type linkup. Then, last Tuesday in Baton Rouge, I learned that the North American Mission Board in Atlanta was proposing the same thing nationwide. That's where we are now.
Several times a day I'm getting emails from people informing me their church is ready and willing to come to New Orleans to help a church rebuild. They know we're not ready for company yet. In fact, we're not even home yet. Although daily we hear reports of some residents being invited to re-enter very soon. As soon as it happens, we'll be open for business and ready to welcome teams from the churches...so long as they understand a few things.
Understand that New Orleans is going to be different. No tours this time to exotic locales. No dining out in your favorite restaurants. It's all work this time.
I may be wearing my welcome out with my friends. Tonight, I'm staying with Charles and Shirley Martin in Brookhaven, Mississippi, former members of our church in Kenner before they retired and moved to the country. They belong to Easthaven Baptist Church here, a congregation that has basically turned over their facilities to evacuees from the coast.
"We're not able to have Sunday School right now," Charles said, "because they're everywhere. We're having a great time, though. Yesterday, our choir was packed and the guests really seemed to enjoy the worship service."
"There's an old trailer park outside of town," Charles said, "that we've taken over. Another church and we are buying a dozen or more trailers and we're setting up there for some of the families."
"We have three requirements," he said. "It must be a real family, not just some people living together. They must agree to go to church, and third, they have to get a job. We're helping them find jobs."
What a day to be thinking of the events of 9-11 four years ago. So many similarities.
This morning, I preached in Meek Baptist Church in Arley, Alabama. This is on the banks of Smith Lake, a resort area. The church is prospering and has relocated with all new buildings in the last few months. In fact, the dedication is next Sunday. They had over 200 in attendance. I talked with them about I Corinthians 16:9 where Paul says, "A wide door for effective service is open for us and there are many obstacles."
Opportunities and obstacles are frequently found hand in hand. God opens the door for a great opportunity and the enemy arrives with obstructions. John Wesley once wrote a brother, "I hear great things about what God is doing in your area. I wonder that the enemy has not raised up a champion against it." He understood that as a rule, where you find one you find the other.
I told the congregation that naive people, those with a shallow understanding of scripture, perhaps think if God opens the door for a great advance, there could not possibly be any opposition. And likewise, if there is opposition, it's a sign God is not in it. Both are wrong.
A little scripture study takes care of that, doesn't it. The history of the movement of God's kingdom through the ages is a story of great opportunities on the one hand while facing incredible opposition from the enemy on the other hand. And often the obstacles grow out of the opportunity, and the opportunity grows out of the obstacle.
September 11, 2001, saw this nation plunged into shock as severely as it has ever occurred. Yet, out of that great tragedy came waves of opportunities to present the gospel to this nation, person by person. And so must it be with Katrina, as God's people take in evacuees and minister to them one by one.
They're now saying they may have overestimated the number of dead in New Orleans. I certainly hope so. It beats me how they ever came up with figures of 20,000 or even 40,000 in the first place. You get these local politicians in front of microphones, they're exhausted beyond words, trying hard to say something that might be helpful, and these numbers come out. To their discredit, the media took it at face value. I pray that on reentering New Orleans, we'll have surprisingly few funerals to conduct.
I noticed something this week about television. The people most affected by the hurricane, people who have relocated into homes and hotels, are watching very little of the continuous coverage. I've not asked any of them, but can tell you personally, it hurts too badly. Neil and Julie and I ate burgers yesterday in BackyardBurgers here in Columbus, MS, and the lone television mounted on the wall had closed captioning. We sat there glued to reading the words from anchors and leaders, and felt the burdens descend on our shoulders again. We will meet this soon enough, just as quickly as we are told it's safe to come home.
Rick Warren said, "There are three stages to helping people in tragedies like this. The first is RESCUE. The federal government is in charge, and it usually takes a few days. The second stage is RESUMING. This is the restoration of utilities, water, services. The local government is in charge and it takes a few weeks. The third stage is REBUILDING. This is the duty of everyone including the churches and it takes years."
Rebuilding is harder than building, Warren said. When you build, you have the fun of seeing something rise where there was nothing. But in rebuilding, you first have to tear out, muck out, and clean out. It's messy. It's the same for restoring human lives. It's harder to rebuild a life after a great loss.
Rick Warren was speaking to a roomful of Louisiana Baptist leaders who had gathered last Tuesday in the fellowship hall of Florida Boulevard Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. He and his wife Kay and several members of the staff at Saddleback Church in Southern California had just visited the Astrodome and spoken to the thousands who found shelter there, then in Memphis to a large group, and in Jackson, Mississippi. They had come to Baton Rouge to sit down with local leadership to hear our plans for rebuilding the Lord's work in New Orleans, and then to decide how their church and the vast numbers who make up the Purpose-Driven network will respond.
Have you ever suffered from sensory overload? You are talking to so many people, both cell phones are ringing, someone else needs your attention--and pretty soon you do not remember what you said to anyone. "Did you get my call?" someone asked. "I suppose," you answer. Anyway, this is where I am today.
After a day of meetings in Baton Rouge on Tuesday to discuss what to do once we're all able to re-enter metro New Orleans, I spent the night with a cousin, then left town early Wednesday morning, bound for my community in Jefferson Parish. The authorities were allowing residents four days this week to get in to check out their homes and pick up any necessities. Son Neil and his wife Julie did it Monday; Wednesday was my day.
The 70 mile drive from Baton Rouge took four hours. My wife had sent along a list of things to bring and a flashlight so I could see inside the closets. Only a wife would have thought of the light; it had never entered my mind. Our neighborhood looked rough. All the trees were not down, but all were damaged. The streets had been cleared of downed trees, so somebody has been working. Shingles from the rooftop littered my yard. If it rains before we can return, I'm in a lot of trouble. And no, I decided not to empty the scary refrigerator or freezer. What's the point; they're ruined anyway. By the time we return, the electricity will be on and the spoiled things will be refrozen, making it safe to remove them before discarding the appliances.
I spent an hour driving around our part of town. Here's a quick synopsis.
Tonight, I'm overnighting with a cousin in Baton Rouge after a long day of meetings at Florida Boulevard Baptist Church here. I drove down from Columbus MS Monday afternoon and spent the night in accommodations owned by the Adams-Union Association in Natchez. Across the street in the First Baptist Church of Natchez, some one hundred evacuees were being housed in their fellowship hall. Volunteers from the First Baptist Church of Comanche, Texas, are helping to provide for them.
When I got to the room last night, Charles Wade called. The executive director of Texas Baptists informed me that they are sending one million dollars to assist churches on the Gulf Coast hurt by the storm. That means churches from South Alabama all through lower Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana. Dr. Wade assured me Texas churches will be receiving special offerings too, and he estimated a couple more million may be coming. Consider that Mississippi alone has had one hundred churches partially or completely destroyed, and you see how great the need is.
How many churches in our area of Louisiana were hurt? We have no idea. So many regions are still off limits due to the high water, blocked roads, and unsafe conditions. Once we're able to return, job one will be finding out which churches still exist and which were erased from the map.
As far as I can tell, every town of any size in the southeastern USA is hosting evacuees from the Gulf Coast region and especially New Orleans. In a program I was watching, participants agreed that these countless thousands consigned to shelters all over this part of the world are not White or Black, not African-American or Anglo or Hispanic; they're all of this, but mostly they're just poor.
This morning at Fairview Baptist Church in Columbus, MS, Pastor Mickey Dalrymple was interrupted in the sermon by one of his men who entered from the rear, walked to the front, and asked for a microphone. He needed twenty men to volunteer to help right then down at Hughes Elementary School where hundreds of evacuees (refugees or displaced persons; what to call them?) are receiving shelter. Was there a problem? No, he needed help in erecting hundreds of cots that had just arrived. Pastor Mickey told me at lunch that more evacuees are supposed to arrive today. I'll be in their service tonight to share the New Orleans situation.
I learned yesterday that a disaster relief group from Arkansas has been in Kenner feeding hundreds of meals a day ever since last Tuesday! No sooner has the wind passed into central Mississippi than these good folks pulled into the city and set up operations. When one group of them announced their intent to use chain saws and clear roadways, they were told the timing was not right for this, so they drove into Mississippi and have been at it ever since.
The group in Kenner, I understand, is being housed and restricted to the Kenner city jail. They cook the meals and police drive the containers to the two shelters in the city where the "refugees" are being held. The Arkansas group is not allowed to venture out into the city for security reasons, I'm told.
All of this is as it came to me, as they say, from a reliable source, but I do not know it personally. And something else.
My North Carolina granddaughter -- an eight-year-old well named as Darilyn (think: darlin') -- was praying for her Cajun cousins and grandparents the other night. She said, "I hope their homes are okay, but if they aren't, let them move close to us." It's great to be loved, is all I can say.
New Orleans is being loved today in a thousand ways.
The amazing thing to me--as a fifteen year resident of metro New Orleans and the director of missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans--is that some are saying New Orleans actually dodged the bullet with hurricane Katrina. If that's true, we do not want to see that bullet, is all I can say.
Here's what I know.