“Joe, I might be late for the pastors meeting Wednesday morning,” the e-mail note said. The writer, one of our displaced pastors, explained about his wife’s surgery and the death in his family. His job is in jeopardy and he still doesn’t have direction on what to do with his flooded church, which has been gutted by teams of volunteers and needs to be restored internally, but what’s the point if no one lives in the neighborhood.

Now–not knowing any more about him than this–would you say there’s a brother who needs your prayers?

Last August, one of our pastors evacuated the area ahead of the storm and found shelter in his home state, only to see both his daughters in car accidents and his father come down with a serious disease and die a few weeks later. Internal stresses with his congregation led him to resign and take a temporary position in another church.

One pastor who lost both his home and his church had a stroke and while he was in the hospital recovering, his mother died.

Want me to go on? I could. I can tell you of another dozen New Orleans ministers who have come through the storm and its devastation only to turn around and find more trials coming, one after another, each one worst than the one before.

We keep asking for prayer for our ministers down here. Only the Lord knows what pressures each one is enduring and only He has the resources and strength to get us through this.

I’ve been camping out in Psalm 84 lately. I was first attracted to that short passage several years ago when a college-ministry committee I was chairing met in a classroom at the old First Baptist Church of New Orleans on St. Charles Avenue. Someone had gone to the trouble of cutting out large letters and stringing on the walls around the room verse 11 of that psalm: “The Lord God is a Sun and a Shield. The Lord gives grace and glory. No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” I sat there transfixed, drinking that in, thinking, “What a great verse. What a wonderful praise, what an incredible promise.”

Psalm 84 contains the church ushers’ favorite passage. “I’d rather be a doorkeeper in the House of the Lord than to dwell in the tents of wickedness,” verse 10.

Lately, post-Katrina, I’ve been claiming for us the promise that God gives to those whose strength is in Him: “Passing through the valley of Baca (weeping), they make it into a spring.” (verse 6)

We’re living in the valley of weeping just now. The wife of a good friend who is a leader in one of our flooded churches came up and hugged me last Thursday. She was working on the church grounds with volunteers from Colorado, and she was in tears. She said, “You would think I’d be over my tears by now.” None of us are. The sadness is palpable. But there’s a promise here.

God can turn it into a spring. A fountain. A place of refreshment and rest and renewal. It’s just like Him to do that. He loves this kind of alchemy, turning the awful into the awesome. The depressing into the inexpressible. A place of death like Calvary into a fountain of life.

When you pray for us, would you claim this, please? That God would turn this devastation into delight, both his and ours.

“They go from strength to strength.” Verse 7. That’s what I had in mind in mentioning this psalm to you, it’s where I was aiming, I just had to point out those other wonderful insights in this psalm to get to this insight. Like stairs we climb or escalators that climb for us, God’s strength and His blessings come one after another, each one pushing us a little higher.

Yes, the hits just keep on coming. But so does the strength. So do His blessings.

Evangelist Jerry Drace has been in New Orleans for 3 months as a part of the Billy Graham organization’s Rapid Response Team. He told our ministers Wednesday, “I’ve learned never to ask anyone around here, ‘How are you doing?’ They’ll tell you, and you don’t have time for their life story.”

He went on. “A better question, one that gets right to the heart of the issue is: ‘Are you getting better?’ The other day in the Sam’s Club store, I was in a long line at the checkout and the girl asked about my Billy Graham insignia. I told her what we do and I said, ‘Are you getting better?’ She teared up to cry right in front of me. And with that long line behind, I held her hand and led her in prayer right there. No one complained and no one left.”

Everyone understood. The tears are always flowing just beneath the surface, the woes come one after another. But thanks be to the Lord, He is here with us, He has not abandoned us, He keeps sending us friends to comfort and encourage and stand us on our feet; we are stronger today than we were yesterday.

And one day closer to being out of all this.

The Louisiana State Legislature is meeting right now in Baton Rouge. Governor Blanco called this special session to get them to consolidate our myriad levee boards into one with overall, sweeping authority. You ought to hear the special interest groups hollering. And to streamline the courts and tax assessors’ offices in the city of New Orleans. With one-third the population we used to have, we don’t need the bureaucracy that weighted us down previously. Again, those who have lived at the public trough are crying foul at the prospect of having to find an actual job.

While you’re praying for us down here, if you happen to mention the governor and the legislature, praying they will do the right thing, we’d appreciate it.