Tim & Liz Havens

Greetings and salutations friends!  When you last heard from us, we were about to embark on a journey that traversed the continent a total of three times (counting the flights from Boston to New Orleans and back as halfway across the continent each).  Well, we embarked, traveled, and returned all in one piece, and we are now in Providence recovering.  Seeing family and friends was wonderful, and the Boston Winter Conference was encouraging, but what Liz and I would really like to talk about is our trip to New Orleans. 

The Camp…

We were staying and working at “The Good News Tent,” a camp that was set up soon after the hurricane and has been helping people ever since.  The facility consisted of a large main tent, two smaller tents for volunteers to sleep in (one for men, one for women, both could sleep about 40), a food preparation trailer, porta-potties and a portable shower unit, and trailers for staff to sleep in.  The big tent was divided into two sections.  In the larger section, between four and six hundred people would eat lunch and dinner every day; church services were held during the meals on Sundays.  The smaller section housed a free “store” where donated items were distributed to people.  Gas generators and propane powered the camp.  Every morning all the volunteers would have a meeting to pray for the day and divide up to work: ten would stay on camp to run the store, cook and serve meals while the rest would divide up into teams to help people gut houses that had flood damage, or to go out and do evangelism in the city.  There was always plenty to do; even after people got back to camp there was dinner to help serve and washing up to be done.  We went to bed tired every night, but it was a great time of bonding with the people on our team, a joy to serve others, and a good way to end our winter break.

Wendi…

One of the neat things that Tim and I got to do together was help a woman named Wendi.  Wendi is a woman with Multiple Sclerosis, has been in New Orleans for the last 20 years, and was being evicted from her apartment.  After Hurricane Katrina, the antique store where she was working decided to liquidate and she lost her job.  She had called our camp to ask for volunteers to help her move her furniture into storage.  When we arrived at her apartment knowing that she was supposed to be out the next day, we realized that, even with 5 people helping her, she couldn’t be out of her apartment in just one day.  Her apartment was filled with stuff—boxes full of clothes, papers, knickknacks, lot’s of things I would consider trash all that she still needed to sort through to determine what was trash, what she was giving away, what was going into storage, and what was going with her.  This poor woman had gotten to the point in her age and illness where she couldn’t care for herself—she didn’t have enough energy to clean, cook, do laundry, etc.—and hadn’t been ready until now to admit that she needed help.  At first I was disgusted at the condition she was living in, but God eventually humbled me.  He made me realize that her apartment was like the state of our hearts before we knew him.  Our hearts were dark, filled with the filth of sin and, He still came in to clean us up.  He reminded me of the story of Jesus and the man with leprosy in Luke 5 (vs. 12-14).  While I wanted to put on gloves and later to burn my clothes when cleaning Wendi’s house, Jesus touched a man with something as contagious as leprosy.  He didn’t make him clean before touching him; he touched him and then made him clean (I think that’s pretty cool J)!  That’s how much he loves us.  Throughout the three days that we were with Wendi, God gave us many opportunities to share with her about Jesus and our faith.  She didn’t accept Christ while we were with her—she had something of a Christian background—but it was neat to be able to encourage her, to help her, and to (hopefully) be used by God to bring her closer to Him.    

Prayer…

It was fun to see God work in such visible ways while we were down there.  At “The Store” that Tim mentioned earlier, people would come in and take canned goods, water, and any clothing that they needed while we (the volunteers) would help them find things and offer to pray with them.  One day the men coming through wanted work shirts and pants and several mothers wanted diapers, all of which we’d run out of.  Without another option we decided to pray for these things that night.  The next morning, a crate arrived filled with camouflage pants and shirts donated by the Army along with several boxes of diapers and baby clothes.  As we were running out of bottled water to give to people that same day, we decided again to pray for the water that we needed.  The next day, what do you know, boxes with gallons of water showed up on our doorstep (or rather under the awning of our tent).  This same sort of thing happened with the propane we needed to cook and to have heat, with the fuel we needed for the generators, and even for the two broken generators (we were out of power for almost two days).  It was a fun formula: we had a need, we prayed, and God answered!