Philip Tallon & Jerry Walls examine the draw of C.S. Lewis.
Sarah Arthur looks inside The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Debating the old professor: C.S. Lewis and the advent of Aslan
Elizabeth V. Glass recounts the re-enactment of a timeless debate.
Hurricane survivors count blessings
Kathy L. Gilbert reports from Slidell, Louisiana.
Jackie Larson tells how one small Texas church is making a difference.
United Methodist Giving Exceeds $7 million
Liberian children offer gift of hope to Louisiana
Kathy L. Gilbert reveals an incredibly sacrificial gift.
Tammy Darling and Christine Pohl remind us of an ancient discipline.
RENEW Women’s Network
To question is not to attack
The Great Commission
Mission work is complete when...
From the Heart
Nothing...except
DEPARTMENTS
Letters to the editor
Straight Talk
News Analysis
News
Church women’s forum brings differences to surface
Confessing Movement issues statement on unity
Church must change world through witness, bishop says
Culture in View
One man’s fall
When rockers knock on heaven’s door
When frantic calls went out for churches to shelter evacuees fleeing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's flooding and devastation, First United Methodist Church of Waxahachie, Texas, stepped up to the plate without hesitation.
While government agencies battled over who would pay for what, churches stepped in and put their faith to work in places like Waxahachie.
"There was no question-this was what needed to be done," said the Rev. Mary Nell Partin, associate pastor and minister for congregational life at FUMC. "From a theological standpoint, Jesus said if you do it for the least of these, you do it for him. So we did."
By some counts, Texas was expected to absorb more than 60 percent of the evacuees displaced-possibly permanently-as the Gulf Coast lay in sodden ruins. Busloads of the evacuees from Hurricane Katrina poured into the state.
Volunteers from around Waxahachie quickly galvanized to pull together mattresses and bedding, food and clothing. When the evacuees piled out of the bus in the middle of the night on Labor Day weekend, a quick survey said that for many, their most immediate need was for showers. Volunteers drove vanloads over to a nearby facility donated for their use by the Waxahachie Independent School District.
Many needed medical treatment, and almost all needed rest. About 10 percent of the evacuees suffered from dysentery after being immersed in polluted water.
The church's large family life center became an instant shelter. While the population stabilized at more than 40 evacuees, each day there was something else to check off a long list of items pertaining to getting shattered lives back in order. Signing people up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was the first step in getting any disaster benefits. Children were quickly registered for school and placed in classrooms so their lives could have some semblance of normality. There was paperwork, lots of paperwork-identification, applications for apartments and jobs, getting back onto federal benefits like food stamps and Social Security. Some of the evacuees had never held a valid driver's license-they had lived in a city with public transit all their lives-so getting them thinking about ride-sharing or even driving was critical. Hopes would rise that the okay for housing had come through, only to be dashed, creating an emotional roller coaster for the evacuees and the volunteers that worked with them-and bonded with them. "The anxiety level runs high, because we're dealing with human needs," Partin said. "It didn't take long to get attached to them."
As experts nationally warned of the effects of post-traumatic stress issues, the evacuees housed at First United Methodist Church struggled to put awful memories behind them.
Mary Gibson was a homemaker in New Orleans. A big-screen TV chattered in the background of the FUMC family life center while she remembered those last days in New Orleans.
After checking on websites, two weeks after the evacuation, she still hadn't heard anything from her husband, a construction worker. "When I was leaving the house, he told me he wasn't leaving," she said.
She climbed out of a second story window at the apartment building. "We were rescued by canoe-they were Good Samaritans, just somebody trying to be helpful, a man and his wife. I'd never seen them before in my life. They said they had come to get us out, that they didn't want us to remain. Our steps had floated away from the house, so we had to be lifted out," she said.
The kind canoeists took the home's occupants, one at a time, to higher ground, Gibson said. From there, they went to the New Orleans Convention Center. She shook her lowered head as the memories came back. "It was overcrowded-we were in the dark, for the most part. We went to the front of the convention center, and we thought we would go inside, but it had a stench like dead people," she said, recalling images of unspeakable horror. "For three days, we had to inhale that, and we had to scavenge and hunt for food wherever.
"Between the heat and the hunger, really frail, frail people just didn't make it..There was a body that just sat there for three days-and we were told it had already been sitting there for three days when we got there."
Gibson has sharp words for whoever was responsible for the dismal conditions evacuees faced after Katrina. "The whole world saw that one," she said.
The Big Easy has become a big heartache for Gibson. "I've had it-no more New Orleans," she said, praising Texas and the kind people of Waxahachie and First United Methodist Church. "When we arrived here, we got a little peace," she said, dark brown eyes wet with unshed tears, remembering a better life, before the levees broke and let the Gulf of Mexico in, days when she herself was a volunteer at a charity hospital and helped with any need that came her way. "I was raised to do unto others as you would have them do unto you," she said.
Far from her lifelong home and everything familiar, Mary Gibson was the matriarch of an extended clan that found shelter at FUMC, and she vowed not to let Hurricane Katrina get the best of her and her family. "I have to keep moving along - it's all I can do," she said.
Carolyn Robinson was a resident of eastern New Orleans, where she worked in construction. As the floodwaters rose, she was brought by an Army National Guard convoy to the New Orleans convention center. That's when the worst of it started. "There were murders-and it seemed like every day, somebody was dead somewhere," Robinson recalled. She remained in the convention center for four days without food when she was rescued and taken by bus to Texas.
Safe for the time being at a shelter in the Ellis County seat of Waxahachie, she missed her life in New Orleans. "Everything I had accumulated in my lifetime is gone," she said, recalling family pictures, access to a rapid transit system, her brand new Dell computer-complete with a CD burner and DVD player. "Gone."
What lingers, however, are the visions to the terrible scenes of New Orleans in a state of watery decay.
A doctor gave her medicine to quell nightmares of gruesome images of bodies and water. "He said the nightmares were from being out there, from seeing things I'd never seen before-I'd never seen people laying on the ground, dead. It was almost like being in a war," she said.
From war to peace, Robinson is recovering slowly at FUMC, and she has high praise for the volunteers. "They took us in when nobody else would. They hustled up some beds and some food, and they took us in," she said. A kind volunteer brought her a nightlight so she could read at night in the darkened gym. Such specific acts of kindness have helped her regain some of the optimism she felt before Hurricane Katrina destroyed life as she knew it. "Sooner or later, it will get better," she said.
Yvette Thurman's fiance was one of the lucky ones. An electrician, he immediately found work at a new elementary school being built in the area. Her background is Baptist, he's Catholic-and the kindness of strangers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has brought their faiths closer together, she said. Together they went to Bible study at First United Methodist to gather spiritual comfort from new brothers and sisters who had taken them in as angels unawares. "The Lord's in all churches-a church is a church," Thurman said.
Sonja Clark, the mother of three, was one of many members of FUMC Waxahachie who came to help. She brought along her three children to help plan activities to keep the evacuee children occupied, happy and distracted from their families' dire situations. "I love children-and I wanted my children to see people from different ways of life and different circumstances," she said.
For Mary Nell Partin, helping restore normalcy for the evacuees was priority number one. She hired one evacuee who had been a chef in the French Quarter to cook for his fellow evacuees, and crowed with good news as one by one, evacuees began to find places of employment. "Our first person went to work today," she said, a smile lighting up eyes tired from 16-hour days in an unrelenting string.
Partin said even after every evacuee at First United Methodist was placed, the work would not be done for the church community. "They know once they get into their apartment, we're going to be here for them," she said.
A piercing question in the form of four letters from a popular Christian bracelet, WWJD, became a concrete reality for the four hundred or so volunteers who came to First United Methodist Church of Waxahachie desiring to match their faith with works. That's the way it should be, said the Rev. Mary Nell Partin.
"What would Jesus do in this situation? He'd be right in the middle of it," she said.
Jackie Larson is a writer based in Ennis, Texas. She can be reached at jk_larson@hotmail.com.
United Methodist cash contributions to Hurricane Katrina relief and rehabilitation have passed the $7 million mark. The figure represents online, telephone, and mail donations to the United Methodist Committee on Relief as of the morning of Sept. 26.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi on Aug. 29, causing widespread damage in the coastal areas of those states as well as Alabama. Days earlier, it struck south Florida.
The new contribution figure, slightly more than $7 million, does not include amounts given in direct response to Hurricane Rita, which struck along the Louisiana-Texas border on Sept. 24. Donations to Hurricane Rita relief can also be made.
Gifts may be designated for work in the wake of either Katrina or Rita or for where they are most needed in the region. Donors making gifts by Internet or telephone may select one or the other or both. This is also true of gifts by check.
UMCOR is providing two giving numbers through the Advance for Christ and His Church, the church's second-mile giving program. Checks should be made out to UMCOR. Note in the memo area of the check "UMCOR Advance #982523, Hurricanes 2005-Katrina" or "UMCOR Advance #901323 Hurricane Rita." Contributions may also be designated for a specific state affected by the hurricanes. One hundred percent of each donation goes to the need designated.
Tax-deductible gifts can be placed in any United Methodist church offering plate or mailed directly to UMCOR, P.O. Box 9068, New York, NY 10087. Credit-card donations can be made by calling (800) 554-8583 or going online to www.methodistrelief.org.
By Elliott Wright, information officer of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries.
Click here to send your response plus the title of this article to us at Good News.