(Editor’s note – At the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, Illinois’ Jared Pryer remembers the years he spent in New Orleans ministering to hurting people in a broken city. And how God turned tragedy to testimony.)
A quote from a former pastor of First Baptist New Orleans etched itself upon my heart in the days following Hurricane Katrina. If you received an email from me during that time, you would have seen it in my signature. You may remember it:
“New Orleans first got in my hair, then on my nerves, and at last on my heart, and brother, when a city gets on your heart, you’re stuck.” – J.D. Grey, Epitaphs for Eager Preachers, 1972.
Even though years have passed since living in New Orleans, this quote still rings true. I no longer call it home, but it was a place that buried itself deep in my heart. Part of me will always remain there.
My brothers and I, who were a part of the recovery ministry team of First Baptist New Orleans (FBNO), poured ourselves out onto the city. We experienced a mixture of great joy and immense sorrow as we led volunteer groups from churches, domestic and foreign, to remove the flood-saturated memories and belongings of families throughout the city. In the joy and the pain, the Lord was present—always present.
Jared Pryer (left) helped clean up hundreds of New Orleans homes following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in 2005.
In the years since, my family and I have returned to the city every few years to visit friends and eat at our favorite restaurants.
Driving along the live oak tree-lined avenues, I reminisce (sometimes out loud to my girls, sometimes in my own thoughts) about the fingerprints of all the volunteers who came to help us. I see my own fingerprints in places.
I had a front-row seat to the recovery of the city I had grown to love so dearly. The teams we led gutted several hundred homes. As I pass by those houses to this day, I remember so many stories of the homeowners and the teams who helped them.
When I have seen news of New Orleans in recent years—whether it be government/political issues, crime, or murder—my mind has often dwelt on the question of New Orleans itself having deep wounds from the storm that never healed. We conquered many of the city’s physical scars with the army of volunteers that came in her time of need. Those scars were easy to sense, as the smell of mold lingered in the city and lines from the floodwater were caked on every structure. If you tried to look away from the physical evidence in one place, you would only turn to find it in another. It was inescapable. I often wonder, though, if we—if I—did enough to apply balm to the unseen scars left in Katrina’s wake.
From August 29, 2005, until sometime before Christmas of that same year, I felt largely numb. It was a time of despair mixed with glimmers of hope. Hope sometimes showed itself in the most unexpected of places.
FBNO’s Disaster Pastor, Travis Scruggs, and I were called upon by one of our church members who lived southeast of the city in Chalmette. Her house had been filled not only with floodwater but also with several inches of muck from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO). She pled for our assessment of salvaging her home. Honestly, I had no words.
As we gathered our thoughts, Travis looked down to find and dig up a decorative stone buried in the muck. On it was the word “Hope.” (See the stone in the lower right corner of one picture.) As I stood there uncertain of what to say, I thought to myself that there was little hope we could give her for her home.
In the midst of my silence, she plunged her words into our hearts and said, “I cannot imagine the weight you both carry as you walk through home after home, as you have mine today. Can I pray for you?”
Those words utterly broke me.
I had felt so little in the previous months. It was as if she took a scalpel to my chest and began to peel back the layers to expose my heart. As the calluses were being excised, I thought to myself, “Why is she asking to pray for us? She is the one who lost everything.” As more of my heart was revealed, the reason became clear. I so desperately needed her prayer.
She prayed for us. I cried. The tears burst forth for several minutes as we stood there in front of her home. The tears continued to flow as Travis drove us back to the church, with me in the passenger seat holding “Hope” in my hands.
In the midst of the work of recovery and rebuilding, I didn’t pause long enough to recognize many of my own scars. In the rush of helping others, we sometimes forget to pause, reflect, and allow ourselves to be filled up by the Lord in order to have something to be poured out.
This awareness did not fully hit me until we moved back to Illinois, into a place that was “normal,” into a place not bearing the scars of the storm. My “normal” for the previous six years had been walking with families as we carried all of their worldly belongings to the curb to be hauled away by FEMA, convincing homeowners whose collections of books and family photo albums had been underwater for three weeks that there was nothing we could do to bring them back to life, and watching barriers topple as we loved on people and aided them at their lowest point, when they realized they could not walk this road alone.
New homes built after Hurricane Katrina.
I watched as forty homes, covering a wide spectrum of colors, arose out of the earth in the Upper 9th Ward, built by the hands of thousands of the Lord’s servants who had come to provide hope and co-labor with us.
Destruction gave birth to new life.
I have often longed to move back to New Orleans, though I realize it isn’t, in some (or maybe many) ways, the city I once knew and called home. In the tempest of Katrina and its aftermath, I saw the Lord in ways I have not often seen Him since, and I long to return to that place. Sometimes I want to enter back into the chaos and know that my only choice is to fall in His loving arms and let go…
…submitting myself wholly to His enduring strength, steadfast love, and unending faithfulness. My weakness overwhelmed by His grace. My inadequacy colliding in embrace with His glory.
2 Corinthians 12:9-10 – But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (ESV)