People are coming and going in our city. The headlines this week announced that the mayor is firing 3,000 city workers, the St. Bernard Parish sheriff is laying off half his police force, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans is letting 800 employees go. Not enough people living in those areas to justify the workers or support the payrolls.

At the same time, Burger King is giving $6,000 bonuses to new hires, payable in increments over the next year. All the fast food places are competing for employees and with a minimum wage of $5.15, they’re offering rates of $8 and $10 per hour. Meanwhile, every reputable construction company and a lot of fly-by-night outfits are hiring every live body they can find. Someone told me FEMA is paying chain saw owner/operators $1200 a day. The hotels are booked solid, with long waiting lines, most of them temporary workers in to help get the city running again. Even if you decide to take one of these jobs and move to the New Orleans area, you’d better have a place to live. I notice a sign–every intersection seems to be growing these stick-in-the-ground signs–in which some guy says he’s buying houses, any house, that sells for less than $200,000. My guess is he will rent them out so long as the construction industry needs them, then count on the housing market having stabilized.

A note from Mary, our “adopted daughter” from when she was a student at Mississippi College and Margaret and I on her ministerial staff at First Baptist-Jackson, who belongs to Istrouma Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. Their student minister Aaron told me Mary and husband Steve were knocking themselves out helping the church take care of the vast number of evacuees they took in. Mary and her good friend Anne are walking wounded, one from falling over a box in the shelter, the other from overusing an already sprained hand. Their church is moving a family from BR back home to Marrero (a suburb of New Orleans, West Bank) today and bringing a full contingent of workers to get the job done in a few hours. They will be cleaning the house (no flood damage) and stocking it, removing a fallen tree in the back yard, cutting the grass, and all the things one has to do when re-entering a house after six weeks away.

Istrouma Church is a great example of what I’m hearing every day: God’s people all over this nation have literally knocked themselves out taking in our dispersed citizens, without the first consideration to color or class or condition, and have showed them the love of Jesus Christ. And they did not require them to become Baptists either.

I’m just one person down here in New Orleans, but perhaps I can speak for many of our people when I say to the people of God everywhere: thank you; you’ve done an incredible job.

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My wife said, “I’m tired of hearing nothing but hurricane news on television.” I said, “If you are, how much more the rest of the country.” She said, “They don’t hear it every time they turn on the TV.” I wonder.

We all know about compassion fatigue. Twenty years ago, every time you turned on the set, you saw the hungry children of Somalia and Ethiopia. At first, you gave money and prayed and contacted your congressman. You gave more money and prayed. Eventually, when the face of another starving child appeared on the screen, you switched to another channel. You just could not deal with it any more.

That’s what we on the Gulf Coast fear will happen. And yet, here in the New Orleans area, we’re just suiting up for the recovery yet to be done. If our friends are tired already of hearing about it and praying for us and helping us, we’re in a lot of trouble.

That said, I need to tell you about Tuesday’s visit into Saint Bernard Parish, the area immediately downriver from New Orleans. The residents have complained for years that New Orleans considers St. Bernard its poor cousin. You’ll find refineries there and fishing villages, but mostly lower-middle-class neighborhoods for people who work in New Orleans. St. Bernard was almost totally obliterated by Katrina. Seeing it this morning, Hiroshima came to mind.

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As I write, just a month after Katrina, ministers from metro New Orleans are trying to regather their flocks and assess their situations. Many are considering the offers of help arriving from every corner of the planet. A group of Korean pastors showed up in Kenner the other day to assist our local ministers. God’s people from all fifty states are sending help. A pastor search committee in Alaska asked me to recommend one of our newly displaced ministers as a possible shepherd for their congregation. Daily, I’m hearing from ministers who are not returning to New Orleans, and from those who have returned and wonder what to do next.

What is a pastor to do in these times? Here are my suggestions.

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Friday’s Times-Picayune, the abbreviated version of our daily paper, carried an editorial under the title “Casting Stones.” A Montevallo, Alabama legislator named Hank Erwin who writes a newspaper column said Katrina was God’s judgment on the Gulf Coast because of the “gambling, sin, and wickedness.” “It is the kind of behavior that ultimately brings the judgement of God.” And what about the innocent victims of the storm? They would have survived if they had only heeded the warnings of “the godly evangelists and preachers.”

The editor called this kind of reasoning “ignorant,” then told of a local Catholic priest using his invocation before the New Orleans City Council last Tuesday to pronounce the same verdict. Monsignor Robert Guste of a Kenner parish evoked groans from his audience as he confessed the sins of Mardi Gras, gambling, and the Southern Decadence festival. Again, the editor was aghast.

William Willimon is a name known to every preacher, as a former Duke University chaplain, now the bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, but mostly the author of a host of great books. The editor quoted Willimon: “I expect there is as much sin, of a possibly different order, in Montevallo as on the Gulf Coast.” Then he asked, “If God punished all of us for our sin, who could stand?” (Which happens to be a paraphrase of Psalm 130:3 and a great question for anyone ready for God to judge other people.)

Early Sunday morning, I couldn’t stand it any longer and added my two-cents worth. In an e-mail, I said to the editor, “I am amazed at the presumption of those who know Katrina was God’s judgment on the Gulf Coast and perplexed by the sureness of those who know it wasn’t. As a minister of the last 15 years in metro New Orleans, it seems to me a wiser course to say: ‘It might be; we surely deserve it; let us seek the Lord.”

An hour later, when I returned my from walk on the levee, Margaret said, “Tony Campolo is on CNN.” I caught the last half of the segment in which Tony and a Black pastor were being interviewed on this subject. The African-American minister seemed to be claiming this as God’s judgment on New Orleans and the coast. The host read an email from a woman named Sandi. “I’m not in favor of spending tax money to rebuild a city that crucifies Jesus Christ.” She went on in that vein for a bit. “What do you say to that, Pastor Campolo?” the host said.

“I say to Miss Sandi, ‘Dear lady, you need to repent. Repent of your self-righteousness. You’re saying, ‘I’m righteous, and they are sinners, so God is judging them.’ What hypocrisy. The far greater sin is to live in luxury when millions in poverty barely exist.”

Oh, I thought you’d find this interesting….

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I spent all day Thursday with three good friends and it was one of the worst days of my life.

We were finally able to get into New Orleans and begin the process of checking on our churches. Freddie Arnold from our associational office had secured a pass that got us past police checkpoints, and with Ed Jelks and his wife Glenda (I told you previously he is a church builder for the state convention), we spent the day visiting over twenty churches.

I’ve been worrying about how to tell this. We confined our visits to Orleans Parish, the portion of our city which is officially New Orleans. We drove down deserted streets with no traffic lights, with destruction on both sides, downed trees everywhere, homes boarded up, every store and every business closed. Not some and not most. Every last one. From the time we entered New Orleans at 9:30 am until we moved into Metairie over 7 hours later, we did not see one place to buy a coke or go to the rest room.

No birds were singing. One or two stray cats showed up and ran away. We saw an occasional worker cutting trees or stringing electrical lines. I think we saw a homeowner or two working in their yards, but nothing more. The silence was eerie. This is a major city populated by hundreds of thousands of people, but none were around.

Every house and business wore racing stripes, lines to indicate where the water had risen and stopped, then lingered. Lines placed there by the filth and ugliness carried in the water. The fortunate homes wore their lines low; most sported them like belts, at mid-level or even higher.

Boats were scattered everywhere. The water was gone, but the boats remained. Good boats, many with motors in place and supplies lying on the floor, just sitting there, by the side of the street or under the interstate. I suppose anyone who wanted one could hitch up to it and drive away. We saw life vests discarded, and debris and refuse washed into corners by the fences. And the libraries. Have you ever seen a library after a flood? Not a pretty sight. Books that have been mutilated and desecrated and muddied and ruined forever, scattered across the floor. Mildew and mold on the loyal volumes still holding their position on the shelves. Dark, dank, depressing.

And now the churches. You wanted to know about the churches, and I have stalled too long.

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“I had the opportunity to share the gospel with Harry Connick, Jr! He was terrific.”

“I’ve been interviewed on ‘All Things Considered’ about what our church is doing. I got e-mails from people all over the country saying ‘I can’t believe they let you say those things on public radio.’ But they did. I had the opportunity to preach the gospel to the nation.”

“I’ve been asked to write an article on this story for Baptist Press.” “I’ve been interviewed on Moody Radio twice.” “Here, Joe, read this story in the paper about what our church is doing.”

You just have to understand that these pastors, the ones excitedly telling how God is opening doors, have sat here in New Orleans basically ignored for years. You’re just doing the Lord’s work, leading your church,trying to get it right, sometimes seeing little fruit for your labors. Then, suddenly, Katrina storms in and a reporter for the largest newspaper in the Midwest shows up to interview you. National Public Radio calls. You have opportunities you have only dreamed of. Your community lines up at your church doors asking for your help.

You have longed to see this day come. To your amazement, it came on the heels of a tragic storm that took the lives of perhaps a thousand of our citizens and devastated perhaps 50,000 homes. God working in a tragedy.

Tuesday, Ed Jelks and I rode throughout the West Bank area of metro New Orleans in his huge truck with “Official Disaster Team” emblazoned on the doors. Ed is a church builder, a construction specialist with the Louisiana Baptist Convention, and a legend in this state. He and I visited twenty of our Baptist churches.

We saw them in every condition–from fully mobilized, excitedly ministering to their communities, parking lots crammed with long trucks of supplies and RVs for volunteers, yellow t-shirted workers everywhere, lines of cars streaming in–everything from that to the other extreme: churches that appear untouched since the storm blew through. Grass knee-deep, shingles that once covered the roof now protecting the yard, a window out here, the roof leaking there.

And the stories we heard.

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“These are from the Baptists of North Carolina. And look–they put enough canned goods for a family in separate boxes, so all we have to do is hand it out.” Each box contained fifty dollars worth of groceries.

Pastor Todd Hallman of Luling’s First Baptist Church was showing me the storeroom where his people were handing out food and water to the people of St. Charles Parish. They’ve been on the job since only a few days after Katrina went through.

“Need a refrigerator?” he said. “I said, ‘Yes! Don’t tell me you’re giving those out too?” He said, “Look at this.” Stacks of motel-room-sized refrigerators lined a hallway. “Where did you ever get these?”

Todd said, “I found out through the Purpose-Driven network that a Hilton Hotel in California was upgrading, so we asked them what they planned to do with the old fridges. They sent us forty-two.” Since the one we ordered from Home Depot will not be delivered for another eight days, I took one. When we no longer need it, I promise to pass it along.

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Margaret and I re-entered our home in the New Orleans western suburb of River Ridge Saturday night at 6:30 pm, precisely four weeks and two hours and a half since we fled Katrina. I revisited our house two days after Labor Day for an hour to retrieve some clothes and check on things, and I thought I knew what to expect on returning. Not quite.

FEMA has been here. They patched my roof with blue plastic to keep the rain from doing further damage. Since Rita dumped more rain on this area over the weekend, this is no little gift. They also left my front door unlocked, a scary thought, although as far as I can tell, we’ve had no losses.

Mold and mildew now decorate the walls of our den and the kitchen ceiling. The grass outside has not been cut in a month and the back fence is down, due mainly to the neighbor’s tree presently squatting across it. These are minor things. Some of our friends lost everything. Nothing that follows is meant to diminish my concern for their losses or to exaggerate our own suffering. Most of our pain is of the small variety, the kind that nags at you and eats away at your equilibrium. Like the fellow said, “I feel like I’m being eaten alive by a school of minnows.”

The first order after moving our bags into the house was moving the refrigerator and freezer out onto the lawn and cleaning them out. We have lots of company in this unpleasant chore. Drive down any street in this part of the world and you may have your pick of hundreds of nice looking appliances in every price range. Slightly used, of course, and forever soiled and spoiled by the decay and fermentation that occurs to organic material when left to nature without the retarding influence of ice or freon.

How shall I describe the experience of cleaning out these units?

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I wonder if the frustration my family and I are experiencing is being repeated throughout evacuation-land?

All week long, we have been occupying suite 104 of the Quality Inn in Ozark, Alabama, where we traveled to last Saturday in order to preach a revival meeting at Ridgecrest Baptist Church this week. Pastor Jim Hill said what we were thinking, that God knew about Katrina even when we all made these plans and we should go forward. Now that the event is almost over, I’m more certain than ever that he’s right.

Frustration, we’re told, is defined as having one’s goals blocked. If my goal has been to be in the thick of things back at home in New Orleans–or at least in the parts of the metro area we can get into, and it certainly is–then, I’ve been frustrated. I know not to second-guess decisions once they are made, but knowing it with your head and not doing it with your heart are separate things. The folks here have treated us royally, not like refugees but as brother and sister come to do the work of the Father among them, yet at every spare moment, I’ve been on the computer or cell phone with our pastors and other workers, trying to do anything I can to encourage or inform.

Today, my computer went out.

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I’m urging anyone who asks not to rush back home into the New Orleans area. While the various city and parish leaders seem to be inviting residents to return, the FEMA director says not so fast. He cautions there is not enough clean water, not enough stores open, and that things are still not up and running sufficiently to take care of hundreds of thousands of citizens coming home.

If you are where you can stay another week, please try to do so.

My brother Ron sent me a weird article from someone who called himself an eyewitness of all the ugliness of the evacuees. This fellow had decided to volunteer in Houston, and after receiving a brief tour of the Astrodome, he stood outside handing out bottles of water to evacuees coming off the endless buses that were arriving from New Orleans. He was offended that few said thank you, and that many preferred a coke or a beer. Then as he did other labors, he was horrified to see the New Orleanians being harsh and demanding and selfish. The conclusions he came to–using ugly profanity and racial epithets–seemed to justify his own mean spirit and his bigotry.

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