Our home base for the entire week was The First United Methodist Church of Pass Christian. All the girls from our group were staying there. A great guy by the name of Mike Zimmerman had come down from the Mercy Center in North Carolina to lead, and most of all organize, a variety of projects for the stream of groups that would be helping in Pass Christian. Now this was a small church to start with, but luckily the Lord spared it from the worst of the storm. It had only two feet of water inside during the hurricane, and that may sound like a lot but compared to everywhere else that was the least amount of water I heard about. All of the walls, including the interior ones, were made of cinderblock, so besides having the carpeting pulled up, half the pews and everything in the extra rooms destroyed, it was a working church. But because there are so few people who are living in Pass Christian, now the already small church only had a handful of parishioners showing up for sunday services. So it was about a dozen locals and 80 of us from Wilmore on sunday morning.
And it really got to me. Seeing the locals who had been through so much, having virtually everything they owed destroyed, still there praising God, its was truly something and brought a tear to my eye. The songs were good, and there were ones I had sung so many times before, but I saw them in a new light. “On God the solid rock I stand”, has such a literal meaning and makes Matthew 7:24-27 more than a parable. “It is well with my soul” cause it sure ain’t well with my house. To believe that “great is thy faithfulness” when you look outside and couldn’t really object to a non-believer thinking “how can God be good if He let this happen?” Truly amazing and reminded me of a similar reaction I had this past Easter. Commonplace songs breaking through the monotony of routine.
Thursday morning, being Thanksgiving, we had another service. It was in the next town over, Long Beach, were the destruction was even worse. To illustrate my point, we drove by a sign for a “Kangaroo” (how the sign was still there I don’t know) but someone in my van asked what’s a Kangaroo? It was destroyed so bad we couldn’t even tell it was a gas station.
After the service we were ready to get started. There is something about meeting the people who’s town you are going to be helping. It pushed me over the edge and not made me willing to “just take it easy before tomorrow”.
As for the work on sunday (which the trip was not about, something you’ll hear more about later)? The one time I needed the measuring tape I brought, I didn’t have it with me. I built some shelves at a distribution center and got eaten alive but what we would soon dub “F’ing Gnats”. Did anyone knew gnats bite? Well I sure didn’t, but I did end up finding the big dipper on my arm.