Serving God, Conquering Katrina

Just after midnight in Gainesville...

My pastor, George Brantley, left our church, The Rock of Gainesville, at 7 pm with a team of 21 great men, including all 5 of our male pastors, headed for Mobile AL to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They're driving 3 vans, and pulling two trailers piled high with bottled water, food, chain saws, and lots of full gas cans to get them home on Thursday. They will work wherever the Red Cross sends them.

I intended to go, but was forced to stay home, having injured my back late last week. As it happens, it's a good thing I stayed here, since I've been at my phone and computer, handling all sorts of contingencies ever since they left.

The team planned on putting their sleeping bags down at our sister church, The Rock of Mobile, but found out just before leaving that the Mobile church is flooded. (The pastor there says his own home, one block away and fifteen feet lower in elevation, is completely under water.) I started making quick calls to old friends in the area, but land lines weren't working and cell phone networks were jammed. I finally got through to my old friend, Don Moen, on his cell phone. He was in his back yard surveying downed trees and a barn with half the roof blown away, but said his house had withstood the 100 mph winds without damage.

My wife also managed to get through to another old friend, Pastor Charles Simpson, who gave me his son Stephen's cell number, who gave me Pastor Oliver Heath's cell number. I finally got through to Pastor Heath, whom I've never met, at 11 pm to ask if the men could camp at the Covenant Church of Mobile, and he was delighted to assure me that he'll open the church at daybreak. If for some reason the church is inaccessible, he said he'd make sure they have places to stay, and that he's very appreciative of their coming. Two churches, two pastors who are total strangers: One family of God working like it should.

It's now almost one a.m. The team has been on the road for six hours, but have only made it to Tallahassee, normally a two hour drive. They've had to buy new wipers for one vehicle, and are changing a flat on another. Fortunately the flat happened in front of a gas station. I expect they'll make Mobile at mid-morning, but it could take them until noon.

Along the way they've been learning more about the damage via phone calls. Pastor George's sister-in-law called to say her home in Metairie, Louisiana is completely submerged along with the rest of the city. We've also heard that some 40,000 homes in the New Orleans area are under water. Mobile was hit even harder. Steve Simpson said Mobile Bay has risen all the way up to the roadway on I-10. One major bridge, just reopened after collapsing during last year's storms, is in danger of falling again.

I thought today about our local newspaper and the fact that this effort probably will not be recorded there. Two years ago they decided to do a "feature" story on our church, which turned out to be nothing more than an effort to pry into our pastor's finances. Rumors flew--this is a debauched college town--that he was pulling down two million bucks per year, about twice our church's total annual income.

But the Gainesville Sun will not cover this generosity, that 21 men, several of them business executives, are sweating and toiling for people they do not know. That Pastor George will give and give, not just water and food and blood and sweat, but cash and love and prayer. It is a story they might peek into, but would either ignore or twist as soon as they found out the largess came from our church. That is not cynicism speaking so much as experience.

Nonetheless we serve neither that paper nor their parent company, MSM's "newspaper of record," the New York Times. Instead these men are on a mission, not to Cuba or Jamaica as some did two weeks ago, but to America's south. They will touch souls that a week ago were hard, but now are soft and ready. Their Christian brothers in Mobile will become foxhole buddies, and the camaraderie will live for years. But most of all, they will bring a smile to the face of God. And knowing these twenty-one hearts, that's what matters most.