This article first appeared at Common Grounds Online.
“Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”
Louis Armstrong’s deep voice resonates over my car stereo as I pull into my apartment complex after a week spent shoveling dried mud, gutting houses, and hauling trash to massive heaps on the sidewalk of the Ninth Ward. Until recently, I’d never been to New Orleans, never seen the “moss covered vines… the tall sugar pines… the moonlight on the bayou,” that Louis crooned about. But after spending just a week in the city taking part in recovery efforts, I feel that pang in his voice, and feel it in a way that he never foresaw.
Growing up in Florida, I was prepared to see hurricane devastation: twisted oaks, blue tarps dotting the horizon, dangling power lines, and broken windows. But my native Floridian blood and the aerial photographs I’d seen on television didn’t adequately prepare me for the extent of the flood damage, even some three months post-Katrina.
A picture of water rising to roof lines didn’t adequately translate in my mind to the reality of drywall that crumbled in my hands, to maggot-infested refrigerators, to eight inches of mud-sludge covering every square inch of grass.
And no amount of news coverage prepares someone for picking up a water-soaked wedding album from the ground, finding a baby picture whose colors have bled together in the water, or scanning the spray-painted scrawl on the front of houses left behind to mark “none found” on this house or “one dead” on that one.
With 40% of the city still without power, few people were to be found in the areas that saw the most flooding. One mostly meets Red Cross volunteers, FEMA workers, those from the Army Corps of Engineers, or the occasional wide-eyed family driving by to survey the damage. One worker we stopped to talk to, Chris, was heading to his grandmother’s funeral the next day. His family had no way of knowing that the nursing home they’d moved her to would one day be under water and that she wouldn’t be evacuated in time. And how could they have known that when it came time to grieve, they wouldn’t even be able to grieve in the home they’d grown up in because the roof would have caved in?
Ben, our host and work coordinator during our time helping Desire Street Ministries, invited us to his home for dinner on the last night of our stay — an act of touching generosity given the circumstances. He and his wife Stephanie live in a rough neighborhood that is now an empty one. When the levies broke, the water came up to within a street of his house. They are among the few with power, a providential blessing since they are coordinating groups like ours, who are lending strong backs and ready arms to work that will take years to complete.
One morning, as we loaded sledgehammers, crowbars, scrapers, shovels, masks and wheelbarrows in the truck before heading to a local pastor’s house to finish gutting it, Ben paused us for prayer and devotion. He read from Psalm 29: “The voice of the LORD twists the oaks and strips the forests bare. And in his temple all cry, ‘Glory!’ The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD is enthroned as King forever. The LORD gives strength to his people; the LORD blesses his people with peace.”
Ben, Stephanie, and the other Desire Street Ministries staff were a picture of that peace within the storm. While Ben’s home was spared, others were not, yet there remained a peace permeating from these men and women. O me of little faith! How easily I survey the damage and lose hope, giving way to despondency, and it is not even my New Orleans, not my “lazy Mississippi”, not my “moonlit bayous.” But this peace, this rest in the Lord, is mine if I’ll stretch out my hand. With an icy wind whipping through the empty streets of New Orleans that morning, it felt good to warm ourselves at the fire of such faith and to remember that God is sovereign and good.
At the end of a long day’s work, a heap of a former life lay on the curb — muddied clothes, broken china, and a water-logged teddy bear peppered the pile of crumbling dry wall, blowing pink insulation, and molding carpeting. While it’s proper to grieve the loss, it’s easy to forget that life does not consist of these things. I think the peace we saw in the faces of the Desire Street staff reflected that. My friend and fellow volunteer Drew reminded me that Ben and the others of Desire Street Ministries made a choice a long time ago that life was not about the stuff. If they hadn’t made that choice years ago, they’d never have moved to what was once one of the worst housing projects in the country to be the incarnation of God’s love among the poor.
So should New Orleans be rebuilt, even though another hurricane would likely flood it again? Should houses be leveled and people barred from returning?
These are hard questions that I don’t dare answer. I don’t know what’s the right thing, or even the best thing to do. But I do know that thousands of people will return to a desolate picture like the one I saw, to tasks that seem insurmountable, and to loss that seems unfathomable. I know that when they return, they will either be left to the bitterness of bearing that burden alone or the hope found in a fire kindled for them by others who know that this world is not our home. I hope that our work that week, and the work of thousands of volunteers, will kindle a fire of hope for others to huddle up to and gain strength for the long task ahead. As they rebuild their lives, I hope there will be servants to encourage them that this is a chance to have hearts and lives “swept clean” and to refill them not with the former stuff, addictions, or patterns, but with Christ.
Can we empty our own lives in a like manner to help our neighbors in need? Perhaps there’s a bit of selfish stench, muddied disbelief, or mildewed passion that needs to be hauled to the curb; I know there is in my life. Then with hearts swept clean and prepared for the advent of Christ, we can look to the needs of others. While we may not all know what it means to miss New Orleans, we should know what it means to long for home. We can relate to those displaced on the long road home, and we can share with our words and actions the blazing warmth of the hope that burns within us.
(This update courtesy of the Breakpoint with Chuck Colson.)
