Potent Stuff

Sunday night, when I arrived at West St. Charles Baptist Church in the west bank community of Boutte, a huge bus was pulling into the parking lot. Some 30 or so teens and maybe 6 or 8 adults all wearing green t-shirts got off and headed into the church. This lively bunch of vivacious folks were from Second Baptist Church, Odessa, Texas, here to assist the church in its Vacation Bible School this week.

“Where are y’all staying?” I asked, thinking they could be boarding in the Volunteer Village downtown or in one of several churches set up to host volunteer teams. “The Ramada Inn in Luling,” they said.

Since it was their first time in New Orleans since the events of August/September 2005, I adapted my sermon to give them information on the city, its ordeal, and some of the blessings of the Lord we’ve enjoyed in these many intervening months.

Monday morning, David Rhymes stepped into my office to see if I could come have prayer with representatives of several church groups he was briefing about the work they would be doing this week. A dozen people, mostly teens, were in our conference room. “Where are you from?” Benton, Louisiana. Jasper, Alabama. (Since that is right up the road from my home in north Alabama, we had lots to talk about.)

I gave the visitors a brief rundown on our situation and we prayed for them, thanking God for the encouragement of their presence. I asked David how many volunteers are in town right now just from our Baptist churches. “Anywhere from 500 to 1,000,” he said, “and it’s that way every week right on through the summer.”

We feel so blessed.


David asked if I remembered “Doris.” Apparently, Doris is a local lady whose home has been restored by church volunteer teams, and who has been led to Christ. When she expressed the wish that something could be done for the morale of her neighborhood, David volunteered to bring some visiting teams over for ministry and encouragement. This afternoon, he could be found at Sam’s Club loading the flatbed up with supplies for the event Tuesday.

No one but the Father in Heaven knows which churches have been here and are here at any given time, or how many volunteers have come. I don’t know of anyone even attempting to count them all.

A few loose ends….

Sunday’s Times-Picayune ran a long feature about our embattled Congressman William Jefferson, he of the $90,000-in-the-freezer-fame. According to the reporters, there are “two” Jeffersons. There is the soft-spoken, brilliant lawmaker, the first U.S.Representative from Louisiana since Reconstruction (note to Ginger: Reconstruction was the period following the Civil War in which the Yankees made life miserable for the defeated Southerners; it ended in the mid-1870s.) He hails from a poor family in Lake Providence, LA, and worked hard for a great education, then saw that his five daughters were highly educated.

Then, there is another Jefferson. This one owned slum housing which he refused to upgrade and rental companies which hired hard-nosed bill-collectors who tyrannized his own people (i.e., African-Americans). There have been lawsuits over his unpaid bills, and a number of other issues which call into question the public image most people have of him as a man of integrity and a great role model.

Newspaper columnist Stephanie Grace writes about Jefferson’s defense, as it now appears, that nothing he did in this fraud case involved paid-for legislation or anything having to do with his congressional office. She says, correctly, that “the problem for Jefferson is that there’s more to the job than legislation. Federal lawmakers also use their positions to help civilians navigate the difficult terrain of government. They write letters, hold meetings, make introductions, and use their publicly funded staffs and powerful positions to exert influence.” Prosecutors are saying Congressman Jefferson did all these things for his clients and “demanded a little something in return.” That “something” involved making his family extremely wealthy. Stay tuned.

Sheriff Harry Lee has returned from his chemotherapy treatments in Palo Alto, California. He’s 10 pounds lighter, down to a svelte 290, and has lost most of his hair, but he’s filled with praises for the power of prayer and retains his fighting spirit for anyone who would dare to take him on in the upcoming election.

The couple who owned St. Rita’s Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, where 35 residents drowned following Katrina, and who are on trial charged with negligent homicice, were in the news last week. They maintain that since everyone agrees it was the faulty levees that flooded the area and that those were the fault of the Corps of Engineers, and that since Hurricane Katrina itself did not kill those people, then they should not be held accountable for their deaths. Other nursing homes in the area managed to evacuate their people but when Mabel and Salvador Mangano decided to stay put, their residents ended up paying for their bad decision.

The state argues that since the Manganos chose to disobey the mandatory evacuation orders, they are liable. Furthermore, the state maintains that St. Rita’s was under water before the levees broke, so what the levees did was irrelevant.

There’s another Katrina case going on. Most readers doubtless saw in the Katrina photos from the Lower 9th Ward the red barge that had broken through the levees and washed up on the property, then sat there until March of 2006. It was eventually cut into pieces and hauled away. Scores of property-owners in that saddest of all sections of devastated New Orleans are claiming that the barge added insult to injury when it broke through the levee and banged against homes before coming to rest atop one. Who is to blame, the owners of the barge or the leasee? And what is their liability? Judge Ginger Berrigan will decide.

Arnie Fielkow is the new president of the New Orleans City Council, a position that rotates between the two at-large members. In an op-ed piece for last Thursday’s Times-Picayune, this former executive with the New Orleans Saints says our nation faced a fork in the road forty years ago, in the summer of ’67 with the War in Vietnam, the civil rights issues, and other domestic programs going on. He writes, “Today I believe New Orleans has reached that same fork, and again I am filled with that same hope and optimism.”

I’m a good deal older than Arnie, and was 27 years old that hot miserable summer he writes about. I graduated from seminary that August and moved from the bayou country to the Mississippi Delta to pastor a church that fall. I have no memories of great things of “hope and optimism” emerging out of that summer. In fact, before long, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were killed and America’s inner cities were set afire. But, we’re going to cut our council president some slack and give him a pass on this historical inaccuracy in order to agree with his conclusion that New Orleans is indeed at a crossroads.

Key decisions are being made about our future in council rooms and courthouses, and yes, in homes and living rooms and schoolrooms, at this very moment.

We will appreciate prayers. Ask Sheriff Harry Lee; prayer is potent stuff.