How I saw God through the swing of a hammer

As most of you know my squad and I recently travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana to partner alongside Samaritan’s Purse disaster relief. There we would meet with homeowners across the city and help with their rebuilding efforts after the devastating effects of Hurricane Ida. This would be the first real opportunity for us to take the lessons we had learned for 6 weeks in Georgia and apply them to real life situations and people.

To put it bluntly-I was terrified. The week before leaving all I could think about was how much I wished my squad could just stay in Gainesville in our own little bubble. I could get over the moldy tents and porta potties if it meant I didn’t have to speak to new people or think of the right words to say to people whose lives had been scarred by an experience I could never relate to. Most of these homeowners were now waking up every morning looking at only the bones of a house that was once a home. And that was something I felt I could never bring comfort to. I was far from qualified for this.

Our first couple days in New Orleans came and went in a fast blur. Monday morning came around and suddenly, I was decked out in a bright orange shirt listening to power tools cut down walls all around me. For a girl who religiously avoided anything even resembling manual labor before the race, this was overwhelming. We briefly said good morning to the homeowner, and she seemed nice enough. None of that really mattered though since I had made the decision to avoid speaking at all costs and just try not to cut off any limbs on the first day. That was my only goal, just make it back to base that night. My plan was going along perfectly for the first couple hours. That is until I had the job of dragging debris through the house to the road. There was only one exit out of the house, and I had to pass my howe owner every time I took things to the road. The first couple passes were fine, I smiled politely and moved on. But the more pass throughs I made the heavier the weight on my chest became. Just go speak, it can’t be that hard. I don’t know when exactly I abandoned my plan of no taking but somehow, I ended up next to our homeowner talking about anything and everything. Our families, paint colors for the renovated house, my love for bread pudding and her great bread pudding recipe. It was so easy, and I felt like I had known this woman for more than just a few hours. By the end of the workday l realized it wasn’t about how well I was at comforting others or having the right words to speak. Or even having the perfect speech presenting the gospel. It was about how well I could sit and listen. And that is it. God had the rest. I could see God’s faithfulness so blatantly through that. He wasn’t just going to send us somewhere and leave us hanging. And that faithfulness didn’t end after day one.

For the next two weeks I continued to see God show up in the smallest of things and see His love and joy even while being surrounded by decay and destruction every single day. I saw His joy in the dance party we had with a homeowner surrounded by wood planks that used to be her master bedroom. I saw his redemption and comfort in the tears of our homeowner and my team leader. My team leader was in the process of gaining another grand daughter through adoption, and he openly grieved for the mother who would lose rights of her baby for him to do that. This brought our homeowner to tears, because she was also a mother who had lost three of her babies to the foster system. There was no shame and no judgement, only love and connection amidst shared grief. I saw what childlike faith looked like and the tender love of The Father through a 7-year-old girl who brushed and braided our hair for us while singing the Frozen soundtrack. I saw His love in our homeowner who adopted my team as her “babies.” She had prayed to God for lots of children and only had one biological son. That didn’t stop her from being a mother to anyone she encountered though. I felt God’s presence while singing Amazing Grace with two different families who knew nothing about each other but could still worship the same God together.

The two weeks I had previously dreaded had become a time completely saturated in gratefulness for God and all the work He was doing. By the end of my time there I found myself weeping at the thought of leaving New Orleans and all the people I had met there. I’m not sure I will ever genuinely love manual labor and will still get anxious at the thought of using any kind of power saw. But looking back at the brief time spent in New Orleans and looking towards the next couple of months in Costa Rica I can say with complete confidence that God’s faithfulness will continue to shine through any situation. And He is just getting started.