The Katrina Anniversary

There's probably nothing I can say about Katrina that hasn't already been said many times over in the past year. I went on a church relief trip to Mandeville La 2 weeks after Katrina had hit and was there for several days. I loaded cars with food and supplies, I was on a chainsaw gang that got downed trees off people's roofs and trailers, I helped better organize medical supplies for the local medical staff that was treating people in the local parish, and I helped unload trucks bringing supplies into the area. I also went into the flood zone in downtown New Orleans to try and retrieve some belongings of a family who's house had been overrun with the floodwaters.

It was a painful trip in many respects. I had never seen such devastation. When we entered New Orleans from the north, the damage was bad, but was fairly on par with what we had seen elsewhere. But when we crossed over the 17th street canal into the floodzone, it literally felt like we had walked into a dead zone. There were no people, there was hardly any noise. All of the greenery was in the process of dying, and the floodwater had turned totally black and as toxic as lava according to medical personnel we later saw. And then there was the smell; I will never forget the smell. I had never been to New Orleans before. I was amazed at how narrow the canal system was and that in a matter of a couple hundred feet, you could go from a part of the city that was damaged but was already working hard to recover, to being in a complete dead zone.

It quickly became apparent that the degree and breadth of the devastation simply would not allow for a quick and total recovery, no matter how many men and materiel were commited to the area. A disaster like this takes time to recover from, and one year later, the truth of this has become abundantly clear. Whatever your politics are, whoever you most want to blame for the aftermath of the storm, I think the plain reality is that everybody in government screwed up at all levels, and the screw-ups are continuing even now.

But fortunately, my hope doesn't lie in government, and it never has. Government can't solve everything. A disaster like this required a multi-sourced effort. And that's where we came in. The church is a very imperfect institution. We, as the Body of Christ, do many things wrong. We in America in particular are too comfortable, we are unwilling to make hard sacrifices, we fraternize with idols that have become acceptable in the church, and this often leads to misplaced priorities. But this is not the end of the story, for it is also true that the church, warts and all, tends to redeem itself in times of disaster. During the Black Plague in Europe, it was brave Christians who treated the dying knowing that their care would likely result in their own death. When Andrew clobbered South Florida in 1992, it was the church who did a good bit of the rebuilding, and stayed to help long after the government had gone back to DC and the TV cameras had gone home to their urban commune in Midtown. And in the case of Katrina, I witnessed first hand how the church was running circles around the government and the Red Cross in helping people begin to get back on their feet. The church wasn't taking its cues from the government; it was doing what God had convicted it to do - help people. When FEMA was nowhere to be found, the church was there. When the Red Cross was mired in red tape, the church was there. The people in that region know who showed up, and they know who stayed.

I haven't had the privilege of going back to New Orleans since my trip last September. But I know of others in my local church who have organized new relief teams and have used their own vacation time in this last year to go back to the disaster zone to help as much as they can. People like this make me proud to be a Christian, and renew my hope in the supernatural power of the church to move with united power. It's a shame that it took a natural disaster to bring the diverging parts of the church together, and this is a lesson we never seem to learn as Christians.

So on the one year anniversary of Katrina, it would be nice for the nation at large to take a good look at how indispensable the church is in the betterment of society. It's long been fashionable to be obsessed with the perceived negatives about the church. But fair minded people need to do better than that. In addition, the church needs to put first things first ALL the time, not just when there's a crisis. If we want to change the world, if we want the Kingdom to come in its fullness, our response to Katrina must not be extraordinary and isolated, but ordinary and common. The issues of poverty, justice, substandard living conditions, crime, access to capital and other resources, and spiritual hunger that Katrina exposed for all the world to see are not confined to New Orleans. These are global problems of immense severity that only the church can comprehensively address. Why aren't we? For those who ask why Jesus hasn't come back yet, it would be wise for them to look in the mirror and realize that God's Bride is not holy, and that a lack of commitment to these global issues of strife is a serious sin that begs for fervent repentance.