We gathered at 9:00 am for prayer and coordination/planning of the day. We
sent crews out to two different neighborhoods: One crew went on a mission to
rip out sheet rock in flooded homes in an older community; the other crew went
to pull muck out of houses in another neighborhood where they have been slow
to get all the wet stuff out of houses, mostly older folks again. Tough work.
The rest of the folks stayed at church to help finish tearing out sheet rock
in the difficult areas in the church....such as closets and in the kitchen. They
also tried to just make the church grounds look a little neater so that when
folks gathered on Sunday morning, they wouldn't be looking at piles of debris
all over the place.
Still another group put on a great cook out - cooking hamburgers and hotdogs
for volunteers and the community. We served over 700. We will be doing barbecue
chicken next Saturday. These dinners are very well received in Gautier, mostly
because no one else is doing this sort of thing in our community....Everyone
is still trying just to put the pieces together.
Sunday, we gathered for worship at 9:00. The church was packed and worship
lasted over 2 hours and we laughed and cried and shared our praises and pain
together and lifted it up to the Lord. Since all of our hymnals were flooded
out, we are using a set of old red hymnals and using some of the really familiar
old hymns, such as "My Hope is built on nothing less" and then "Tell
me the Old, Old Story," however with the latter, I apparently had the wrong
version, but we muddled through it.
This evening, I noted several stories in newspapers around the country on
our church. Here is one written in
Romanian.
Early on, we had a U.S. State Department official come to the church with a Romanian
Reporter and several of our members took her around Gautier to see how we were
affected. |
