|
What I've Learned
After Four Hurricanes - Nancy Kenney
I can’t possibly
write everything I’ve learned over the last two months. I’m
sure I don’t even realize all I that I’ve learned. I do know
it’s left lots on my heart and given me much to pray about and
process. I also know there are avenues I need to walk and
things I need to do because of what I’ve learned. There are
hundreds of pictures in my mind. Many of the things I’ve
learned are encapsulated in these pictures. I’d like to do my
best to share just a few of the many snapshots I’m processing.
It’s the local
church...
...not the top heavy agencies with big
salaries, lots of media, but little output at the bottom, that
is the answer for the local community. It’s the local church
that can go door to door and find the elderly couple living
under the remains of a condemned house and provide a tarp for
the family living with rain coming through their open roof.
The local church can find the right sized clothes for the kids
whose belongings are all mildewed and destroyed, but are
supposed to go back to school in a week. It’s the local church
that can set up a mobile kitchen and serve thousands of
hamburgers with potato salad and fruit or a breakfast of
pancakes and sausage.
It’s not only the
large corporations...
...that send semi loads of commodities to distribute that make
an impact, but local businesses like Dunkin’ Donuts, that came
on numerous days with big racks carrying hundreds of hot, just
out of the oven, bagels and muffins. After the next hurricane
Dunkin’ Donuts set up a tent, where day after day they handed
out thousands of donuts and iced lattes. It was local
businesses that provided food for the volunteers, and
businesses that sent their employees (paid) to be volunteers.
Generosity like this turns a city into a community of
neighbors.
It’s the
volunteers...
...that can let one individual or family know that they’re not
just a statistic; not just one car in a line of thousands
waiting for some ice and water. It’s the volunteer, who can
simply care enough to say, “How are you doing? Do you have
electricity yet?”
It’s extraordinary
people in ordinary disguise...
...like the couple from across the state who had lost their
ice cream business so brought the remains of that business
across the state and stood in the sweltering heat of the
Florida summer scooping out ice cream to hundreds of sweaty,
tired refugees (an awesome treat in such circumstances!). Then
there was the family, who set up a grill on a corner and began
to cook hot dogs for hundreds of hungry disoriented people.
They were ordinary looking people, who pulled their trucks up
to a corner and began to hand out ice and water.
There was the man, who’d just gotten his electricity turned on and came
to give out his remaining six or seven bags of ice, not
knowing that our distribution center had momentarily run out.
There were people living in distant cities who went to
Wal-Mart, filling up the back of their Suburbans or pick up
trucks with food, baby items, and toiletries and came, not
knowing where they would disperse these things, just knowing
they needed to do it.
There was the owner of Orphelia’s Pasta House that, after cooking for the
Methodist Church, stopped by Convoy of Hope’s site and offered
to cook some more, creating a long line of people eating
sautéed shrimp with garlic and Portobello mushrooms, as well
as hamburgers and hotdogs! There was a multitude of “ordinary”
families that took neighbors they’d never met, into their own
damaged homes, because they had nowhere else to go.
It’s me, one
individual who knows Jesus...
...that can lean on the edge of the car window and pray with
the old man, who starts sobbing the minute I say, “How are you
doing? Are you ok?” It’s one ordinary individual that knows
Jesus that can pull a distraught person out of the line and
say, “Come on let’s talk for a few minutes,” and remind them
there is a God, Who is there, or say, “Come on, I’m going with
you, we’re going to find a way to get you some help.”
And it only takes
a couple of minutes...
...to remind a woman, who has recently lost her husband, has
no children, and has gone through the hurricane alone, that
God has promised to be her husband and she can call on Him for
all her needs. I saw the light come on in her eyes as she
said, “I never thought about it like that!” It only takes a
few minutes to show a volunteer, who feels guilty because she
evacuated and experienced no loss, that she did exactly what
she needed to and therefore is able to do the perfect thing in
helping others.
I saw the joy as she was set free and with a big grin threw her fists
into the air and cried, “YES!” It only takes a minute or two
to remind someone that God is there when everything else is
destroyed. It only takes a minute to pray a prayer with
someone, or to turn someone’s eyes from the damage to the
answer and from the circumstances to Jesus.
It only takes a minute or two to let someone experience God’s love.
|
