“We think it may have been a tornado that hit Memorial Baptist Church,” a member told me Tuesday morning. We reported here a couple of days ago that when Gustav blew through our area of the world, the storm did only minor damage to the city and our churches with the exception of roof damage at Williams Boulevard and Memorial Baptist churches, two congregations no more than a mile apart.

Some of my pastor friends report they’ve visited with Memorial pastor Jackie Gestes and they are amazed at how upbeat he is. He had just transported his ministry library of 2,000 books to his church office–and then the storm drenched the offices and sanctuary. We stand in amazement at the fortitude of this brother—and so many others further west, who are picking up the pieces of their own storm-battered lives.

All this reminds me of two friends—Pastor Jose Mathews and my grandchildren’s cat Lizzie, and what they endured from Katrina.

In Jose’s case, his church–Discipleship Baptist in east New Orleans–was drowned and ruined and the congregation scattered from one end of the USA to the other. He lost his home due to the flooding, and he and his wife relocated to the Baton Rouge area. Inside the next year, Jose had a stroke, his mother died, and his only son, age 22, was shot down on the streets of Houston, Texas.

The hits just kept on coming.

At the weekly pastors gathering, colleagues would gather around Jose and comfort him the best they could. In truth, we were standing outside such monumental suffering, wondering how any human being can absorb such a beating and still return to the surface ready to serve God.

For the past year or two, Jose has been pastoring a church in Baton Rouge.

Lizzie, the cat, is more like a metaphor for the trauma a lot of our people went through.

Lizzie is an outside cat and was nowhere to be found on the Saturday our families evacuated in front of Katrina. A week and two days later, when Neil and Julie were able to return home for a few hours to check on things, the children ordered them to bring Lizzie! They had worried about this cat.

They managed to find Lizzie and put her inside Neil’s pickup for the long ride (six hours) back to Columbus, Mississippi, where we were all staying. This was a new experience for this outside cat.

Once they arrived at the home where we were staying, the cat darted out of the truck–and straight into the local cat who was the very definition of territorial. The cats hissed and Lizzie ran straight up to the top of a tall tree in the yard. There she stayed.

“Leave her alone,” our host Randy McCall told Neil. “She’ll come down.”

But she didn’t.

Two days later, Neil told Randy, “We have to get Lizzie out of the tree.” Using ladders and sheer nerve, Neil climbed up and got the cat.

When I arrived, the children said, “Grandpa, want to see Lizzie?” She was being held inside a pet carry-on in a back bedroom. They opened the door to the cage, but poor lizzie huddled in the back, too traumatized to want to have to have anything to do with anyone.

“We all know how you feel, Lizzie,” I said. And we left her alone.

A perfect situation for pet psychologist, I figure.

Lizzie is still around, safeguarding the underside of the house and the back yard.

The weather channel interviewed some guy from South Florida the other day about preparations for Hurricane Ike which was aiming toward the tip of the state. “Are the people around here going crazy, preparing for every hurricane that comes this way?”

The man said, “No, we are Floridians. We’re used to this.”

I thought, “Give me a break. No one gets used to one crisis after another, one trauma on the heels of another.”

More and more, I’m understanding why people want to live in the mountains.

This morning’s news told of a nuclear program in Europe that may destroy the earth in the next few weeks.

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” Scriptures remind us.

Hope man doesn’t get in His way.

But just in case we’re going to be destroyed, I’m going ahead and eating all the ice cream I want today.