By LONNIE WASCOM, DOM, Northshore Baptist Associations: LaTangi, St. Tammany, Chappapeela
NORTHSHORE, La. – Katrina remains as fresh in my mind today as when the strong category 3’s winds changed the landscape.
On Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005, I preached in Independence, La., for a building dedication, and later fought traffic due to contra flow as I tried to get my wife’s parents to our house in Hammond from their place in Slidell. By late that night we had all battened down for the storm. At this point most of us in Hammond still suspected we would be spared the full brunt of the event.
On Monday the 29th we stayed tuned to our favorite weather person, Margaret Orr, Channel 6 TV and WWL-AM in New Orleans, and were truly relieved when we heard her on our battery-operated radio. She broadcast from her home in Lakeview later that day, after the storm had passed, that “it looks like we have jumped another snake in New Orleans.” After the storm passed, my father-in-law and I did a “recon” of my subdivision and found tremendous wind damage. My neighbor’s beautiful house was ripped apart by fallen trees. However, all my house lost was a piece of overhanging shingle about the size of a credit card. We had a prayer meeting of thanksgiving. (When Gustav came he ripped my house to pieces but that’s another story for another time!)
Then we went to sleep and the levees breached and Mr. GO flooded and the Rigolets in St. Tammany went under and my Aunt on Bayou Liberty Road in Slidell was stranded and our world was changed forever.
My in-laws were concerned for their house in Slidell so Wednesday morning I loaded them up and proceeded East to try to get to their house on Airport Road north of I-12. We were not allowed in due to water. We came back to Hammond. Since most of my wife’s people live in East St. Tammany we were concerned with what we saw that morning and the realization that large portions of the area were cut off because of water and first responder limitations.
The first truly heart-touching event for me was learning that some men who worked at the same Catholic school as my 70+ year-old Aunt, Edrel Pichon, and lived in her Bayou Liberty Road neighborhood, became concerned for her and all their neighbors. They cranked up the outboard motor on their skiff and went up and down the highway looking to rescue anyone they could find. They found Aunt Eddy standing on the roof of her Toyota under her carport where the water was rising and was already past the level of where the doors met the windows. Her rescue brought home to me what we heard was going on all over southeast Louisiana.
On Wednesday afternoon/early evening after I returned from Slidell (see above) as my son and I did a run-through of the northern portion of our region. The roads we were able to negotiate showed extensive damage. It took about six hours to complete what normally would have been about a 45-minute drive. All this time I was trying to reach people but had no cell or landline service. So I knew what I had to do: personally visit every church site. Since my neighbor is a “hoarder” and knows very well what I do for a living, I had access to his virtually unlimited fuel supply. So, off I went that Thursday morning, Sept. 1.
The next significant event in my memory occurred as we first went to the north side of Slidell where I was now able to access and get my folks home. Their house was undamaged, praise the Lord, and they moved back in and set up camp. I left and headed north toward Pearl River and Bush. As I was halfway between the two, in the church community of Evans Creek Baptist Church, I saw Mark Torres, seminary student and pastor, working in the church yard. Mark is a native of Pensacola so storms were “old hat” to him though he was only about 23 at that time. I pulled in and asked what he was doing and could I help. He told me he was checking everything out and mobilizing his people to set up a water and emergency rations distribution for the community. He said, “I want the Evans Creek community to know that God’s people are ‘on the job’ in their neighborhood with a ‘we are here to serve you in the name of Jesus’ attitude.” I wept with gratitude.
Later that day found me driving along Hwy 190 in Lacombe where I found Byron Brown, pastor of FBC, up on a ladder near their church sign. “What’s up?” I asked. “How can I help? How’s Liz and the kids?” Byron let me know the family was OK as he evacuated them to their extended family in North Alabama and that he was making sure the sign read that FBC would be holding services on that Sunday. Byron assured me that the Gospel of hope would be preached in Lacombe the following Sunday. Again, I wept with gratitude.
The next day, Friday, Sept. 2 – five days after Katrina made landfall – I made my way to East Slidell. On the campus of Grace Memorial Baptist Church I spotted a Disaster Relief unit from Florida. “How did those guys get dispatched so quickly?” I asked myself. As I was walking to their unit, Pastor Bob Heustess of Grace Memorial intercepted me.
“Are you the one we are to look for or is there another?” he asked. I told him he and Grace Memorial were in BIG trouble if I was the “one” they were looking for. I asked, “Who are those guys from Florida and how did they get dispatched so quickly?” “They are from Olive Baptist in Pensacola,” Bob told me and they came BEFORE the NAMB and Florida Baptists could dispatch them because they remembered that when Ivan was bearing down on them it was some North Shore Baptist Associations folks who showed up at their church with ample supplies of ice, water, and volunteers. You guessed it, I wept with gratitude.
Later that Friday I made it to my office for the first time, only to see trees across our driveway blocking access. However, a couple of guys from Jerusalem Baptist Church in Pumpkin Center came by and they had a path cleared quickly. Trinity Pumpkin Center, had electricity so we loaded all the computer and electronic equipment we could move and set up operations in their facility.
The three moderators, who along with me serve as trustees for the North Shore Baptist Associations, had somehow reached each other and a meeting was planned at Trinity for later that Friday. Each of the moderators had difficulties of their own but those were set aside so that a couple of important decisions could be made that would enhance our Baptist family’s cooperative response to the crisis:
1. We would dip into the Chappapeela and LaTangi Baptist Associations accounts as soon as banks reopened and give a check to each church in St. Tammany Baptist Association, the hardest hit, as a gift from their sister churches.
2. We committed that no matter what our convention partners did, we would commit every resource to the recovery effort. All associational spending was suspended except and unless it went toward helping our churches get up and going.
By the time I arrived home that night I was cried out. All the way home I gave thanks to God for every good and perfect gift. I did ask, I admit it, that if possible, there be electricity at my house when I arrived home. It was my birthday and that was all I asked for: a little air conditioning. Alas, there was none. Not yet, anyway. Two hours later we had AC. Praise God and “happy birthday, Lonnie!”
Let me share one more. I could tell dozens, perhaps hundreds of stories like those above and this one. It was a couple of weeks later and we were set up with incident commands in Hammond, Covington, and Pearl River. I was operating out of a hyper “task” mode. I arrived during the middle of the day at FBC Covington with a task to perform: I needed some time with Pastor Waylon Bailey to discuss an additional ministry effort we wanted to locate at their facility.
I spotted Dr. Bailey crossing the campus toward the feeding unit. He had been working that morning as a “pile it” on their chainsaw team. The “pile it” guys are the ones who take the product of the skilled labor folks (chainsaw operators) and “pile it” here or there or wherever the blue hat instructs.
We hooked up and headed toward the feeding unit to discuss the matter I needed a decision regarding. A compact car with a young woman driving with a small child in a child restraint in the back seat pulled alongside us. She asked for certain kinds of help. She was obviously frazzled, stressed, and afraid. I immediately went deeper into my “task” frame of mind with a list forming in my head of places she could go to get the specific help she needed. But not Pastor Bailey.
He asked if she had anything to eat and when she and her little girl had been fed. She admitted it had been awhile. He urged her to park her car, get her little girl, and join us for lunch. While we were eating he probed deeper into her need. She acknowledged her fear. And this great pastor took her by the hand, looked into her eyes, and said, “I am afraid also. And I don’t know all that’s going to happen. But you are here and the things you need are going to be gotten and you are loved more than you can imagine.”
We were all weeping and I realized once again, though Disaster Relief and Recovery is primarily task-driven, the task it is driven toward is meeting the needs of people in the name of Jesus. Then Jeremiah 29:11 crossed my mind at that moment, especially as it is rendered in the New American Standard translation, “For I know the plans that I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope.”
And that is why the North Shore Baptist Associations churches have invested in a feeding unit, shower unit, laundry unit, and several recovery units (chain saw units, one of which includes some heavy equipment), so that we can be used by God to meet human need in the Name of Jesus. In the calamity that was Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath, the Gospel of Hope that assures us of a God-promised future was the most important product that we delivered as North Shore and Louisiana and Southern Baptists cooperating together.
Lonnie Wascom has been director of missions since January 2004 for the St. Tammany, LaTangi and Chappapeela Baptist Associations on the North Shore of Lake Ponchartrain.