FERRIDAY—“God will provide!” When Pastor Wayne Gray speaks those words, many listen and learn to trust God.
Gray’s faith was born out of his own crisis of belief in 1999, he said.
“Genesis 22:14 became my life verse: ‘And to this day it is said,
“On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”’”
Gray spoke those words to a young father who had lost everything after
Hurricane Katrina. The man, who had no money (even his bank was
destroyed), arrived at the Delta storefront mission desperately
searching for baby formula for his daughter who had a serious heart
condition and needed a certain kind.
The father, whom Gray could tell was used to providing well for his
family, was forced to ask others for help, and, much worse, was still
falling short of what his loved ones needed.
“God is really good at providing things,” Gray told the man who, at Gray’s request, wrote down the name of the formula.
Sticking the slip of paper in his pocket, Gray prayed with the man and
assured him that God would take care of him and his daughter.
The next day, Gray went to Istrouma Baptist Church in an 18-wheeler for
supplies to help provide for the many evacuees in his town. After
loading up, Gray was about to leave when a worker stopped him, asking
if he needed anything else.
Pulling the slip of paper out of his pocket, Gray handed it to the worker, who looked puzzled.
“I’ve never heard of it,” she said. “But we have a room full of formula, stacked to the ceiling.” She went to check.
There was one case in the whole room. Gray took the case of formula,
set it on the seat next to him, drove back to Ferriday, and delivered
the formula to the grateful father, he said.
“God provided exactly what they needed,” he said. With that one case,
the young father was able to provide for his daughter until things got
back up and running. “In the midst of all that, God took care of that
one little, specific request in a miraculous way.”
Gray also spoke about God’s provision to a desperate grandmother, and
this time he ended up learning the lesson again himself.
When the Red Cross set up a distribution center in Natchez and began
giving evacuees $1500 each, people came from miles, as far away as
Mobile, Ala., to collect the funds so that they could provide for their
loved ones, Gray said. Several thousand people stood in line each day
to receive the funds.
One grandmother, an associate pastor herself whose church was under
water in New Orleans, drove from Monroe in hopes of gathering enough
funds to see her and her daughter and infant granddaughter through,
Gray said. Realizing she wouldn’t make it to the front of the line in
one day, she left the line and went to First Ferriday, where she spoke
to Gray.
Distraught and no doubt exhausted emotionally, physically and
spiritually, she demanded that Gray give her money, he said. Gray,
reluctant to begin giving money to individual evacuees, offered the
woman water and food, encouraging her that the Lord would see her
through.
The woman, still very upset, began to plead with Gray, becoming more
and more distressed, saying she needed gas, formula and diapers as
well.
“Think back, remember that the Lord has taken care of you so far,” Gray
told her. “There’s plenty. Please be patient. God’s going to take care
of you.”
But the woman continued to be distraught, so Gray, after giving the
woman some diapers and water, asked the church secretary to write her a
check for $50, which would provide her enough money for a tank of gas
and food.
After they’d prayed and he’d given her the check, she said she wanted to pray for him, which she then did. Then she left.
A month later, Gray got a letter from her, thanking him for his help
and the money. In the letter, she said she was now on staff at a church
in Monroe. She had also enclosed a $100 check made out to the
church.
“Sometimes you just have to listen, love [people], and do what you can,” Gray said.
First Ferriday, which had been a Red Cross shelter before and had
served as an evacuee shelter on several other occasions going back
several years, already had some experience when Katrina hit, and thus
offered to open its doors.
The aftermath of Katrina, however, was a different matter altogether,
Gray said. “Never had anyone stayed over 2-3 days.” After Katrina,
people stayed 3-4 weeks. “It was an emotional but very positive
experience as a whole.”
“We never needed anything,” Gray said. “For the first 2-3 weeks, we got
very little from the Red Cross-but God provided what we needed.”
The experience gave the church an opportunity to reach out to people
from different cultural backgrounds and races, Gray said. “We had to
work to relate to them, but we found out they were people just like
us.
“Out of 80 folks, maybe one third would come to church on Sunday
mornings and participate in activities,” he said. “The day they left
they shared testimonies and thanked the church.
“Toward the end, as our people started getting tired, the Red Cross was
starting to catch up and began offering help,” Gray said. “We asked for
more people. And [the Red Cross] began running the shelter—it was
interesting because they brought a business-like structure to the
shelter.”
The church, which had been paying the expenses of the shelter out of
its budget, had begun wearing out and running down when the Red Cross
came in. Nevertheless, the Red Cross workers presented the church
with a new opportunity to serve.
“Everyone was experiencing compassion fatigue, which is almost like
depression,” Gray said. Workers became tired physically and emotionally
and lost the ability to sleep, to deal patiently with others, and most
of all to experience compassion. At least a couple of times Gray saw
workers hit the wall and begin to cry or have conflicts, experiencing
fractures in their relationships.
With 80 people in the church shelter and another 2-3000 staying
in homes in the area coming by for supplies, workers were stretched
thin.
Of the four to five Red Cross nurses staying in the church, caring for
the evacuees, only one was a committed Christian, Gray said. “We had
tremendous opportunity to share with them.”
“They came a long way,” he said. “They would get frustrated with Red
Cross about the lack of supplies, but I would tell them that God would
supply, and then someone would show up with just what they needed.”
The nurses heard the words, “God will provide,” from Gray so often that
it became a common refrain for them to express a need, and then,
spotting Gray, say just as quickly, “I know, I know. God’s going to
provide.”
“A lot of the Red Cross workers said they had told their families to
send money to [First Ferriday],” Gray said. When the church began
receiving money from all over the country, it set up a disaster relief
fund. Then a local corporation donated to the fund, and even evacuees
donated. In all, the church collected $12,000, Gray said.
The church closed the shelter on a Monday, cleaned the building and
said goodbye to the last Katrina evacuee, Gray said. By the end
of that week, the church had opened its doors again for 80 Rita
evacuees, who stayed a couple of days before leaving for home.
Phasing out of Katrina and getting into Rita, Gray became more aware of how Southern Baptists were providing, he said.
“God began to give me a vision about rebuilding broken cities and
broken lives and becoming more involved in helping rebuild the Gulf
Coast region.”
He began preaching to his congregation out of Nehemiah, putting out a
plea to develop a disaster relief ministry, to which end the church
used most of the $12,000 that had been donated previously, he
said. The church trained 30 disaster relief volunteers to work in
feeding units, mud out crews and chainsaw crews.
The church bought a trailer and equipped it with supplies, which took most of the month of October to get together.
The church has sent chainsaw crews to Bogalusa and Dequincy and mud out
crews to New Orleans, Slidell and Chalmette. Roof workers have
gone to Bayou Delarge, south of Houma.
First Ferriday has also put a roof on Calvary Baptist church outside of
Leesville and has provided workers at Oak Grove Baptist in Cameron.