stressed and overwhelmed

Sorry I haven't updated in a couple of days. I know that many of my friends and family have been checking the blog pretty often because of Katrina. The truth is...I have hardly had a spare minute over the past couple of days. We are being contacted by churches and individuals all over the nation that want to help.

Yeah, so I am overwhelmed and stressed. I am beginning to feel the weight of the circumstance we find ourselves in. It's kinda funny, my gut reaction was that I would have to put my role as "pastor" on hold until we were able to all get back into the city. That is the furthest thing from the truth. I think I am perhaps having to work harder and longer hours now than I did out of my office in New Orleans! I am excited to say that we have found a way to keep many in our church connected...via the internet. We started a blog, thinking that we would need a place to communicate information to our church, as well as a way to just make sure everyone is okay. Come to find out, we are all starving for community. We need each other so bad right now. I was surprised at my emotional reaction to talking to Toni on the phone the other day. She and Jonathan are here in Birmingham too. I have savored the phone calls I have received from friends and family from New Orleans. Going through an event like this...and not being able to be together for support and encouragement is really hard. The blog is starting to get cluttered, there is so much activity there. So we started a message board. They are much more conducive for the type of connecting that is going on. Hopefully it will become our place where we "meet" instead of 3712 Herschel St.

The second part of my job has become "spokesperson" and "networker." Since I am the one staff member who can be easily reach via cell phone and internet, I have become the person who people contact when they want to help. We have been contacted by well over twenty churches that want to help. These range from "we want to send you a check" to "we want to adopt you as a sister church, send money, supplies and work teams. We want to help you figure out how to reach people in New Orleans as a result of all of this." I have enjoyed contact with church leaders all over the country...including some good friends (Aaron Latina at Calvary Church Mid Rivers, Alf Nelson at Grace Fellowship Church, John Talley at Calvary Bible Church, and Steve Foster at Sayrewoods Bible Church) These are men that I deeply respect and love. I am glad to count them as my coworkers in a time like this. Who knows where God will take us?

Crystal and I are doing fine here in Birmingham. We are very comfortable with our good friends Jeremy and Christa. Our boys have adjusted well to sharing a house with another family with two girls (Harper is five and Liv is three). In fact, we have had the house to ourselves most of the weekend and Sam seems a little out of kilter. He keeps looking around for his new friends! Maybe he has adjusted too well. He might get a little lonely when we finally are back in our own home!

So it looks like Birmingham will be home for a while. It seems that we will stay here until we can get back into New Orleans. If our home is not livable at that time, Crystal and the boys will possibly stay in the Baton Rouge area while I head down into the city to start to get the church facility up and running.

Speaking of our church facility, we were able to find an aerial photo of the property online. I cropped it and posted it here. It looks like we didn't sustain any major damage, although Crystal is a bit concerned about what looks like a car right next to the front building. It would be a tragedy to arrive back to a building with no major hurricane damage, only to find our property looted. Please pray that our building is okay. Many people will be without homes, and we would like the ability to shelter people ASAP.

Talked to my Dad for the first time last night. He is in Houston right now. The long and short of the story is that his house took in about 4-5 feet of water in about an hour. Mind you, his house is raised about 3 feet off the ground...that means 8-10 feet of flooding in an hour. They had enough time to move some possessions up into the attic before the water got to them. They spent the first night in the attic, were resucued by boat, spend the second night in the Superdome, were helicoptered out to the airport, spend the third night in the airport and were flown to Houston. He described the Superdome as "pure evil." Wow.

My cousin Forrest worked with the National Guard on Sunday through Thursday. He manned the Superdome and roamed the streets downtown. He mostly dealt with crowd control and defending against the gangs and looters. It was not fun. He said that there are people down there that are very dangerous. It is as if there is no law...every man for himself. I talked to him last night and told him that over the last few days, his job has let him see the worst of humanity and my job has let me see the best of humanity. He says we should just stick with my people.

I guess that is enough for now. We hope to try to refocus a bit next week. Perhaps we can get our minds off of our circumstances a bit. I need to start reading again. I need to hang out with some old friends who live here in Birmingham. I especially need to play that vintage Nintendo that Jeremy somehow got his hands on. Super Tecmo Bowl, Mike Tyson's Punch Out and Super Marios Brothers. Yeah!