The Gulf Coast and New Orleans Hit Again?

 Seven years ago I was starving for news. My home was in one of the hardest hit areas on the edge of New Orleans, and we were wondering what happened. By this time (September 2nd) I was back in the region, not New Orleans, but a bit north in Mississippi. Our home Church had sent a team to check on some friends of the pastor and give out some supplies. Being able to serve took my mind off of the deviation of my community. I was doing something to help some of the people hurt by the storm, even if it was not my own community.

Seven years later, its weird. Things feel much different. My family no longer lives in the New Orleans area and we have significantly fewer friends that live there than we did before. Issac was not a Katrina, though it was devastating in its own right. My wife and I were concerned for the area, for the people and for our own friends who remain, but we were not glued to the news. I guess going through Katrina, in the sense that we had more friends and a home in the disaster area, was quite different for my family than for the rest of the nation who was not as connected to the region. We lived in the area that was then under water, and we knew our home and possessions were there. We knew people who died as a result of the storm. Now, as I experience Issac as an outsider, maybe I am beginning to see that Katrina was just another disaster in a world filled with disasters.

It is interesting to think I might have felt about Katrina the way I feel about Issac now, if I did not live in the New Orleans area at the time Katrina struck. For me and my family, that would be completely different. We learned a lot about God's provision, mercy, and grace through the post-Katrina life we lived. We learned that our things (that is our stuff, our material possessions in our home) were not nearly as important as we treated them. When you lose everything, you gain a tremendous sense of freedom. In the months following Katrina we were given many wonderful gifts by people who wanted to ease our suffering. To put it plainly, we got a lot of stuff. With that came the loss of the freedom we had when we had so little. We gained some comfort from our possessions, but we also had to take care of the possessions and make sure they were secure.

We tend to think it is the abundance of things that make us free, but maybe it is the lack of things that make us free. Maybe each little item we “own” actually ties a small string to us. More and more stuff equals more and more strings, which lead to less and less freedom. Maybe that is a lesson that God wants us to learn. The more we focus on the “stuff” that we have on earth, the less we can find our delight in God. The less “stuff” we have, the more opportunities we have to delight in God. Of all the things we lost in the storm, I knew God would never lose us. And we never lost God either, because when all was washed away, we still had a string tying us to God.