Last summer on our way home from Idaho we stopped in a little park for lunch and frisbee. The youth all filled out evaluations, and every single person said they'd like to go on another mission trip.
Driving along, I wondered how we would decide where to go. There are so many possibilities. It was three weeks before Hurricane Katrina would devastate the Gulf Coast.
In the fall I got to meet a number of times with a group of young people who brainstormed every possibility from a retreat in Alaska to inner city work in New York (and many in-between). They kept coming back to serving in the hurricane area, despite the cost and logistical challenges of going there.
I remember the evening when the youth leaders made their presentation to adult representatives from all the churches in the county. They described their vision--hard questions were asked and answered--the group voted unanimously to approve the plan. Then the adults walked out of the room shaking their heads, wondering how we would ever pull it off.
With God's help (and our participation), nothing is impossible.
~The Rev. Michael Carney
Mission Trip Sermon—August 13, 2006
By: Erin Searfus, Samantha Haycock, Samantha Vethavanam
George’s Episcopal Church, Antioch
ERIN: I can change the world
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: Make a better place
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: Make a kinder place
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: Look at our hands. Think of all the hands we’ve held.
SAM V: I met a girl who eagerly explained to me what a hurricane was. It is three things. One it is very dangerous. Two its two winds chasing each other. Three it changes people’s lives. She told me she stood inside her house behind a sliding glass door and watched the winds raged. Her house was so ruined she had to move to Indiana where she spent the next year. Even though she didn’t want to leave her home, she had to make the best of her situation. She quickly became accustomed to her surroundings when it was finally time for her to return home to Mississippi her class threw her a party and where she received a card from every student but one, who happened to be sick that day.
ERIN: I met a woman named Barbara. She had a husband and daughter who was a senior in high school last year. She had lived in a town in Mississippi her whole life with her parents, grandparents, and aunts & uncle. That is, until the hurricane destroyed all their 70 some year old houses. When returning to the neighborhood several days after the storm, the family was silenced by the sights. Her husbands truck was blocks away from their house, her fathers home was now only a foundation, and her house was torn open to expose her kitchen and other rooms all combined together. She recalled the week before the storm and all her normal monotonous activities. Her family was at a school football game on Friday night and she never could have imagined not having a house on Monday morning.
SAM H: I met a seventy-some-odd-year-old man named Robert James, who went by RJ for short. He lived about two bocks from the beach. When he and his wife found out the storm was coming she decided to seek shelter farther from the coast while he rode it out. In order to protect his house RJ tucked towels along all the doorjambs that led outside. About an hour into the storm he realized how ridiculous this was. RJ watched through his front door as the winds blew debris in and the waves dragged rubbish out. The water rose higher and higher till it reached his chest. In the middle of the storm RJ looked up to the sky and screamed you are God and I am man prove it and God did. RJ’s house was surrounded by a five foot high brick retaining wall which during the storm protected the house from flying debris. The wall eventually crumbled but RJ’s home was salvageable, suffering only from water damage. When the storm died down RJ laid down on his floating bed. When his wife returned to town she found him laying in bed covered in a blanket of mud drinking from a six pack of Heineken next to a squirrel. In RJ’s last words with us he said everything is temporary. That could never be more true.
ERIN: I can make peace on earth
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: I can clean up the earth
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: I can reach out to you
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: Look at our hands. Think of all the tools we’ve held.
SAM V: I worked for four days in Biloxi, Mississippi.
ERIN: I built a brick wall with my own two hands.
SAM H: I painted a porch with my own two hands.
SAM V: I roto tilled a lawn with my own two hands.
ERIN: I raked through grass with my own two hands.
SAM H: I pulled weeds with my own two hands.
SAM V: I leveled a yard with my own two hands.
ERIN: I cleaned up remains of destruction with my own two hands.
SAM H: I spackled, painted, and sanded with my own two hands.
ERIN: I’m gonna make it a brighter place. I’m gonna make it a safer place. I’m gonna help the human race.
ALL: With my own two hands
SAM V: I saw what was left of Hurricane Katrina. The visible changes are still prevalent in every moment of native’s lives. There is still garbage in trees. Toys and personal belongings scatter the ground, not yet claimed. Bent poles and broken signs indicate locations of stores that once stood and now are non-existent. I passed a cemetery every day whose mausoleums were flattened to the ground and whose tombstones were knocked over or shattered in pieces. Blue tarps marked the tops of houses who had been damaged during the storm. Whole floors were missing from buildings. Spray paint marked the doors telling me brief stories of the families who lived within. Water lines reached up over my head showing me where a flood once stood. A thirty day notice warned residents of a FEMA trailer their time was running short.
ERIN: I can hold you
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: I can comfort you
ALL: With my own two hands
ERIN: But you got to use
ALL: Use your own two hands
ERIN: Look at your own hands. Notice all the lines, all the wrinkles, the calluses and soft spots. Think of where they’ve been for the past two weeks. Who have they touched? What work have they done? Who have they held in comfort? Who have they congratulated in joy?
SAM H: What can you do in a world where people are forced into homelessness by others, where the government refuses to take action, where repairing is left up to volunteers? How can you use your own two hands?
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