A crazy and good day as Crisis Response staff.
Right at the moment Eloise Wierzbicki and I are the only Crisis Response staff in Fort Myers, so I’ve been working on a few things that can be done solo. Last Friday (August 30, 2024) I had a typical list. I started by mounting a dog treat and prayer request box near the driveway of Fort Myers Evangelical Free Church. We hope this will be a small blessing to the many people who walk their dogs in the church parking lot.
My next task was a typical “no teams” activity. We keep four generators in our supply trailer in case of a storm or flood that causes people to lose power. Like all generators, these tend to sit for months or longer without being used. So I pulled them out into the sunshine, put a little gas in them and ran each of them for about 15 minutes. No sweat, except that just being in the sunshine was a great cause of sweat.
That was my morning. I grabbed a quick lunch changed my sweaty shirt and headed down to Sunshine Village, a community near the water where we are just starting to rebuild homes. Though I wasn’t planning to do any rebuilding, I did hope to catch up with one or two homeowners. By God’s timing I arrived just as one of these homeowners walked out of his house. He greeted me warmly and invited me in. As we sat, I asked him about some recent medical scans we’d prayed about earlier. He’d gotten the results and they’d found four significant problems, including probable prostate cancer, an abdominal aortic aneurysm, and potential liver cancer. He was handling all this well but I could tell it was really good to have someone to talk to, and someone to pray for him, which I did. This is exactly the kind of ministry that we intend to have in Crisis Response, not just rebuilding home, but relationally supporting people to show the love of Christ.
As I left Sunshine Village, I got a call from a guy in Spring Creek, where we have rebuilt many homes in the past two years. He attends the men’s Bible Study I help lead in that community. He asked if “you still have a pickup truck.” By “you” he meant Crisis Response. Turns out he had bought a refrigerator at Lowes, but had no way to get it home. I told him we had plenty of trucks, but I wasn’t driving one at that moment. I would need to go back up to Fort Myers EFC and swap vehicles, then come back down to help. He was OK with that, so that’s what I did, not only providing the truck, but helping to load and unload the refrigerator and get it in the house. This is another whole side of the ministry, being the hands and feet of Jesus for his people, even long after their houses have been restored.
There are no typical days in this ministry, but that was a particularly satisfying one. It’s a privilege to be able to be here and represent Jesus in all this different ways. But we can’t do it without your partnership, prayers and support. If you’d like to help with our financial support (which is running a bit behind), visit Giving: Bob and Gail DeGray. . If you want to be on our frequent pray-ers team, just drop us an email, a text, or reply to this post.