I'm back...

This is an attempt to encapsulate my time in New Orleans which was brief, wonderful, and awful all at the same time.
I'll begin with this picture. This is my friends Lisa and Julianne. There was another friend who was somewhere else when this picture was taken, Emma, who was equally wonderful to get to know but I failed to get a picture with.
Anyway. This picture was taken on the last day at the family's house we were fixin' up. The house had been all but destroyed when the levees broke after the hurricane Katrina went through in August of 2005.
Without sharing the whole story of how this family came to live here, sufice it to say they were one of the countless families who lost everything but their lives in the storm and now are living paycheck to paycheck to pay the outlandish mortgage payments, tax payments, and insurance. I don't know if you caught this or not but we were fixing up their home so they could live in it. So where are they living currently?
This is where they are currently living.
Behind their house in the one room garage converted into a home over a year ago where mom, dad, their nine children (ages 15-3), and dog, Roxie...reside.
They have amazing optimism and inspiring hope for all this.
During the last day together the mom came in as we were setting up and she went to the back room where here youngest two children will sleep. She paced back and forth and had a glommy look about her, which we hadn't experienced. When one of my commrads asked her what was going on, she just talked about the water that had appeared from the storm the previous night. I can only imagine the fear that was rushing through her as she relived those horrible days and weeks where survival kicked in and the life they had known became a distant memory.
It's kind of like after you're in a car accident...for weeks, or months afterwards you jump every time a car approaches the area you were hit. You get tense the moment you sit behind the wheel. Maybe you can't even get yourself to get behind the wheel.
Some people have shrugged their shoulders when I told them where I just spent the last 10 days. They say, "Why bother?"
To that I say this...
With all sincerity...this is why I went.
Because God "bothered" to send us Jesus to lift us out of our despair and save us from our hopelessness.
The love I know because of Jesus sent me to New Orleans and sends me forth to seminary to be a reconciling agent for The Church.
I hope more people will continue to make that treck to Mississippi and Louisiana to give a piece of hope back to the people of those areas.
I hope people will be inspired to give of themselves a portion of what's been given to them to bring about heaven on earth.
I hope people so passionately pursue being agents of love, hope, and peace that the world won't have to ask why we do what we do, they'll know because it so encompasses the work of Jesus' followers.
So from now on when anyone asks me what it was like, I'm going to give them this website http://odr.edola.org/volunteer/planning_your_trip.html
and encourage them to grab 5-6 other folks and go see for yourself!
God's Peace!