On Sunday, July 20th, twenty-nine missionaries — youth and adults — left Harvey Browne Presbyterian Church for a week of mission work in Memphis, Tennessee. We settled in at Balmoral Presbyterian Church, ready to work with the Center for Southern Folklore, help with the children's summer program at St. Mary's, deliver meals on wheels, work in the handyman program at Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association (MIFA), and work at the Civil Rights Museum.

All that changed after a devastating storm hit Memphis and the surrounding area at daybreak on Tuesday morning. The storm left more than 300,000 homes without electricity. The damage from wind and fallen trees was widespread. The agencies and organizations we were going to work with were among those hardest hit by the storm. MIFA and the Museum were left without power and St. Mary's suffered roof damage that forced the temporary cancellation of their program. Even the church where we were staying was without power for most of the week.

But God had called us to mission. Even though the "how" and "with whom" of mission had changed dramatically, we could still answer that call by joining hands with the people of Memphis to begin the overwhelming task of cleaning up from the storm. So we cleaned up debris, packed and delivered shelf-stable meals for MIFA, cleaned up debris, moved food out of a rain-soaked food bank, cleaned up debris, moved furniture and files out of a rain-soaked Episcopal clergy support office, cleaned up debris, did handyman work for MIFA — and cleaned up more debris

Many of us, discovering our real role as missionaries, realized that this was the first mission experience we had had in which we were in the same situation as many of the people we were helping. During our candlelit evenings back at the Balmoral church, we agreed that God had truly called us to Memphis. What a joy and privilege it was to answer God's call!