what happened...

Last week nine (mostly college students) from Grace Church went to New Orleans to put hands and feet to the Gospel. We had the opportunity to work alongside Americorps volunteers associated with Trinity Christian Community doing house gutting in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In the time we were there, we gave 346 man-hours of labor, over $10,000 of work and worked on three different houses.

As a regular Newsweek reader, I had my opinions going into the situation. "Why didn't these people just evacuate?" "It can't be as bad as the news made it out to be--they sensationalize everything!" "It's a year later, I hope there's enough work for us to do when we get there." And on and on my thinking went. I learned evacuation is a much more complex, time consuming, and expensive ordeal than I realized. The news is certainly biased. It didn't adequately cover how Katrina devastated the wealthy and poor alike (though, of course the poor have no recourse to recover without outside help). The news has also given those of us in California the false notion that things are getting back to normal by the lack of coverage (until the recent blitz as we approach the one-year anniversary of Katrina. Wait until the second week of September and see what kind of coverage New Orleans gets). While some sections of N. O. are humming along, most of the city is STILL in ruin. Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint.

On the flip side, we all noticed that it is the Church (local congregations from all over the country and parachurch ministries) that is taking the lead in getting it's hands dirty with the practical work of house gutting and rebuilding. It is the Church that the Lord is using to rebuild the homes of the poor. The Lord is bringing glory to Jesus Christ through community development of ministries like Trinity Christian Community who have faithful men and women like Kevin and Sandy Brown, Brian and Larie who have returned to N. O., where God has called them to "seek the welfare of the city." (Jer. 29:7)

I will try and capture some more reflections on our trip in future posts. For now, these are some initial thoughts and photos of our team and what we saw. I'd love to hear you reactions...