Rita Help --The Mini Mission

Today a group from my new church went to help with some of the Rita devasation in East Texas. I was honored to be able to call and say I could go to help. The journey took almost 3hrs as we were in evacuation like traffic. (ended up being a four car wreck far ahead near a bridge) Thankfully some of the passengers knew alternate routes so we headed on back roads to get to our destination. You could certainly see when we got closer to the devasted areas as there were more trees through homes and tarp covered roofs. The church that was send us to our assignments was FBC-Kirbyville. We reached there and all went to the bathroom. Then we divided up into the Chainsaw group and the Food Group. Jokes were made most of the morning about the risks for the Chainsaw group. We were going to have only four do the food so more could help haul, but the Kirbyville pastor's wife said that hauler for the wood weren't as needed. So we sent more to food. The area we went to still had many places with no power or power just within the last couple of days. Some of the homes still didn't have drinkable water. We set up near a tree outside of a church building. As people came by we were able to offer them jugs of water, cans of food, snack items, and eventually ice. I enjoyed my task of carrying water jugs to the cars of the people. Later in the afternoon, I suggested that we use the children's wagon someone in our group had brought to be able to deliver some of the ice to those down the road. We took about 20bags of ice to those people and let them know food was available if they wanted to come get it and we could also give them more ice. Overall one of the things that can't be said enough is that most all of the people we were helping didn't want to take more than there share. I had to reassure many people that it was ok for me to have given them three jugs of water for two people. (heck we would have done more but we didn't know we were going to get more water when we started) Things slowed down around 3:00pm so we loaded up ourselves and headed back to meet up with our Chainsaw crew. When we got back to them the group worked together to haul limbs from a yard, then we grabbed drinks and headed to come back home. We listened to the Astros game on the way back. (oh joy..lol) As we got almost all the way back, we came upon traffic again. We again used the intelligence of the church members to take some back roads to get us away from the traffic. The funny part about this back road thing was that we took the same exit each time!
Two wonderfully positive things about this day was that the senior pastor was very much involved with this and totally had a servants heart as he went where needed! I truly love my new pastor. The other was that God made it so we didn't face mosquitos. We only batted at LoveBugs throughout the day. This was a true blessing even though we were all prepared.
I very much look forward to helping the next time.