I don’t exactly write books; I tell other people to write books.

The story behind that cryptic comment is this: when Rudy and Rose French left New Orleans nearly a year ago, after an incredible two years in our post-Katrina city with so many ups and downs, I suggested Rudy write his experiences down. My initial thought was it would be therapy for him, help to “get it out of him.”

The British have a saying that one handles tragedy by “tea and talk.” Putting his experiences in writing became a form of talk for Rudy. The tea, well, Rose has to take care of that.

To my pleasant surprise, Rudy not only wrote his experiences and testimony down, he published it in a book. “You Can Learn A Lot From A Hurricane: My two years in New Orleans following Katrina” is Rudy and Rose French’s story.

Now, Rudy and Rose are missionaries. They are missionaries everywhere they go, not just at some site where the denomination might send them. Recently, he went to Korea as a short-term missionary. Right now, they’re living in Springville, Tennessee, and are missionaries there. For two years, they were missionaries to New Orleans.

Regular readers of this blog have heard some of my stories about Rudy. Some you didn’t know it was Rudy I was writing about, because I didn’t want to embarrass someone he was bumping up against in his service for the Lord. Rudy is the guy who left Canada, selling his gun collection to pay expenses, and drove to New Orleans to help us following the hurricane of August 29, 2005. When we didn’t put him to work, he volunteered at one of our churches that was feeding state troopers from across America–and the ladies in the kitchen put him in charge of the garbage detail. Now, Rudy began to have a little attitude problem.

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Following Katrina, as groups re-entered the city and began to organize for ministry, quite a few gravitated to the name NOAH as their title. Southern Baptists did, then found a United Methodist group already had staked it out, so ours became Operation NOAH Rebuild, the NOAH standing for “New Orleans Area Hope.”

As we reported here recently, it now turns out the City of New Orleans had its own version of NOAH, the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corporation. Established as a non-profit outfit to supplement the work of volunteers who were being overwhelmed by the scope of the rebuilding yet to be done, NOAH has become a front page story for the worst of reasons. Thursday’s headline reads, “Volunteers did the work but NOAH contractors got paid.”

Two years ago, Mayor Nagin said he wanted the city to offer gutting services because the faith-based and grassroots organizations just couldn’t do it all. This was the centerpiece of his 2007 budget, funded with several million dollars which, no doubt, came from the federal government directly or indirectly.

The NOAH agency was headed up by Stacey Jackson, who has resigned in the last couple of months. The office worked with sub-contractors who then gutted out houses assigned to them, turned in an invoice and were reimbursed by NOAH. That was the plan, at any rate, and it appears to have worked. Sort of. Somewhat. To a certain extent.

The fact is no one knows. No one from the city’s NOAH agency checked to see that the work was done, we now learn.

So, among the scandals now coming to light is the fact that at least 90 homes which NOAH paid contractors to gut out were untouched by those companies, but volunteers from around the USA did all the work.

(We cannot emphasize too strongly this controversy has NOTHING to do with Operation NOAH Rebuild, which has never charged anyone a dime to gut out or rebuild a house. This is a ministry of God’s people helping our people in need for the glory of Jesus Christ.)

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Friends. They make life so much fuller, fun so much deeper, work so much easier, and burdens so much lighter.

I urge young pastors to “find yourself some friends; you’re going to be needing some.” Not all pastors know this or believe it.

Amazing how much independence and isolationism one finds among pastors. They will stand in the pulpit and exhort their members on the virtues of fellowship with one another. They will illustrate the point by the well-worn story of the pastor who sat in the living room of a straying church member and with the tongs, reached into the fireplace and moved a burning coal off to one side where it proceeded to die. The enlightened member told the pastor he got the point and would be in church the following Sunday. “We need each other,” the preacher tells the congregation.

Pastors believe that for everyone except themselves.

The average pastor seems to believe that fellowship with other pastors is time wasted. Whether this is a personality quirk or some theological snag formed from a misreading of Scripture, I’m not prepared to say. But it’s dead wrong.

The Lord thought the preachers needed to get together. He chose twelve–make no mistake, they were chosen to be preachers–and kept them together for three years. When He sent them out, it was in pairs. When God called missionaries, the first went forth as a team, Barnabas and Paul. The second generation was made up of Paul and Silas, plus Barnabas and John Mark. No one went alone.

On Paul’s final trip to Jerusalem for Pentecost, he sensed a deep need to visit with the leaders of the church at Ephesus. A messenger traveled to that city to round up the church leaders, bringing them to the coastal town of Miletus for a day with Paul. Acts 20 describes the meeting and uses three terms for the leaders: elders, shepherds (pastors), and overseers (episcopos). We moderns would do well to note that the head of that congregation was not one hot-shot know-it-all man, but a number of people working together as a team.

How does one find a special friend? First, you won’t find them in clusters, but one at a time, slowly, carefully.

My own plan is simple: ask God, then pay attention.

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This land is far from being overpopulated. If you doubt that, take a drive and notice how mile after mile is woodland and farmland. Even New York State–which I crossed this week and will do so again Monday on my way South–is mostly one big city and a lot of rural countryside.

The corridor from Washington, D.C., northward through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City has the worst mishmash of interstates and toll highways imaginable. If you doubt this, get down your atlas and stand in awe. Some of the interstate segments are so scrunched in with the others, the pages have no room for the numbers. I missed a sign in New Jersey and went 10 miles out of my way before turning around and at the last minute finding the correct turn. The tolls coming up (from Washington to New England) figured out to something like 20 bucks.

One of the best traits of human beings is our adaptability to difficult situations. Drive through any of the interstate corridors in and around Washington, D.C., and be amazed that people who grew up in “normal-land, USA” can adapt to such killer traffic patterns and go on to deal with it every day. That’s one of the most admirable traits of the human animal—and the fact that we put up with it one of the worst.

You’d think that after a while, a person would decide, “The stress of driving in this traffic is destroying my nervous system and dooming me to an early grave; I think I’ll move to a quiet town somewhere.” The fact that we don’t, that we hang in there for the sake of a job and money, speaks volumes about us, and none of it is good.

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