Strategic Positioning

The third day of Katrina relief was kind of discouraging at first. I mean, from working with real people who need real help to picking up trash. Big difference.

My team came across a house that we actually shouldn't have entered--we were technically trespassing. It still had clothes hung up in the closet. On the door was written in mud, "We are OK." Two years later. Incredible.

It was also on this day that two of my team members came across a man by the name of Frank (I think). He was building a house for Miss Cunningham, a very nice elderly lady. He was building a house for Miss Cunningham by himself. Eventually he would get help from two or three Mennonites, but that's still a measely amount of people for building a house.

So this house had to be 11 feet up in order to meet insurance guidelines, and the holes that had been dug by a machine the day before had partially collapsed. Word to the wise: don't build a house on swamp ground. So, we told him that we just happened to have 30 people and were looking for more projects.

He was astounded. He had just been asking God how He was going to get this done: it looked hopeless. But God uses His people--He organizes them in a way we don't understand. Who would have thought that 32 college students from Colorado would end up helping this particular person in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi? God would.