Gail and I were in Florida from early February to early April. We came back to Houston to have our puppy spayed and see family. We’ve also had a chance to walk down memory lane.
Our sending church, which is our home church, is Trinity Fellowship in Friendswood, Texas. Trinity’s congregation recently voted to sell the church buildings to a local home school association. The church will continue to meet in the building, but has to sell, move or get rid of most of the stuff accumulated over thirty years to make room for the school.
Wind back the clock to 2017.
I was the pastor of Trinity Fellowship. Gail and I already had some connections with ReachGlobal Crisis Response, having served in Galveston after Hurricane Ike (2008). But we’d never had a response to a hurricane of our own.
On August 26, 2017, Hurricane Harvey stalled over the Houston area, bringing fifty inches of water to our part of the county. Our church was one of thousands of structures that flooded. Crisis Response soon arrived on the scene and our church became a response site, rebuilding home and influencing lives for over three years.
Early in the response one of the volunteer teams left behind a piece of drywall with their church name and team members’ names. This immediately became a tradition. In the three years before the site closed over 60 teams made drywall signs, many of them very creative. The Crisis Response staff at the site started to hang these signs high on the walls of the fellowship hall where most team activities took place. Here’s a small section of the wall:
Now come back to April of this year.
Gail and I were asked what we wanted to do with the signs, since they couldn’t be left in the building. We decided to take the signs down, photograph them and make a photo book. It became a walk through memory lane. Many people who volunteered in this Hurricane Harvey response were our friends or became our friends. Many of the signs reminded us of these dear people and the hard work they did to restore homes and pursue relationships with homeowners.
Here are four signs that were especially precious to us. (Note: click on the image to see a high resolution copy.)
This sign will be both first and last in our photo book. The team from Lakewood Church (Katrina Welch’s home church) came to Texas six times. The first of these, as listed on the sign, was less than two weeks after the hurricane. The last was during the shutdown process for the Friendswood site. They are wonderful people and always faithful.
Two churches in Minnesota who came together as a volunteer team two years in a row. Notice that the bottom half of the sign (the MN) is dated in 2018 and the top half of the sign (the sunrise) was added a year later. Many churches send teams each year or even multiple times each year.
Our daughter Hannah lived in Greensburg, Pennsylvania during the Harvey years. She told her church about the response in Friendswood, and they sent a great team (and made a great sign). Hannah’s name is not actually on the sign, but her husband Darin’s is.
Our fellow staff member and friend, Eloise Wierzbicki, is from New Jersey and this team was from her home church. They have continued to bring volunteer teams wherever Eloise has worked, including Lake Charles, Louisiana and Fort Myers, Florida.
Bonus sign! The tradition of signs carried over to our next response site in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Trinity took teams to Lake Charles twice, and this is one of the signs we made. For those from the Houston area, the Texas/Louisiana graphic is based on that year’s “Space City Weather” t-shirt.
If you would like to be on a volunteer team, we would love to have you. If you can find a few people to bring that would be great, but two or even you yourself would work too. This summer we have several weeks when we are putting together rag-tag teams of one or two people, and you would be welcome to join them. The weeks are those beginning May 31st, June 7th, and July 26th. If you have any interest in this or questions, simply contact Bob or Gail and we’ll help you along.
Thank you for the update. My time serving in Fort Myers Florida was wonderful and made a great impact on me in my mindset of serving. We are trying to bring what we learned as a team to our Penn York Mission team. Praying for each of those I met and have a mission card for. May God continue to bless the ministry. God is so good! Susan
Prayer request: I may be looking at a shoulder surgery in the next few weeks. Please pray for successful surgery and quick healing and recovery. Thank you