Ruth Hernandez of our Louisiana Baptist Convention office in Alexandria sends this along:

Rewriting the History of August 29th: A Prayer

Thank you for letting me understand homelessness, living without power, without television, without cool air in the heat;

Thank you for letting me understand hunger, the leisure of dry clean clothes and the relief of a place to sleep.

Thank you for letting me understand the deep and overwhelming sadness when forces, beyond our personal control, take the loved, the familiar, the usual.

Thank you for my needfulness and for my newfound empathy for those homeless before the storm and homeless now and for those hungry anywhere, for those in need everywhere.

Thank you for the opportunity you provided to help my neighbor, to be my brother’s keeper, to serve food, to patch roofs, to clean yards, and to start mending that which was broken.

Thank you for the chance to change ourselves,

for a reprieve from the normal, commercial day,

for teaching us to make do,

to get by,

to improvise,

for drowning our conceit,

complacency,

callousness,

for silencing the noise,

for stopping the clock,

and for the chance to act our best

when the worst occurred.

Thank you for the people who reached in, pulled out the living, cradled the dead, comforted the broken and torn apart, wept for the splintered and uprooted. Thank you for the people who didn’t wait to come right away, who opened their homes, who emptied their shelves, their closets, who cleaned, fed, healed, held us, who told us our spirit was amazing, and who keep on coming.

Thank you for the people who measure their faith by their actions, and measure their actions by its consistency with their faith.

Thank you for all the people we have met, who are new friends, new Loved ones, new brothers and sisters, new neighbors.

Thank you, KATRINA.

Not for the wind,

not for the water,

but for the appreciation of the things no storm can shatter,

no water can wash away,

no wind can move.

Written by Tom Teel and Reilly Morse

Tom Teel and Reilly Morse are local attorneys in Gulfport, MS.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

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