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By: Amy Erhart '09 After a hard day working in a moldy and leaky house, our crew trudged back to our home base of army cots and porta-potties. Slightly ravished after eight hours of gutting houses, we lined up for another meal at the Good News Camp. Thus began one of our favorite parts of the day—conversing with construction workers and the homeless residents of the area.
I sat down with some Kansas City natives who had been here the entire seven-month duration and had already started Christian band on the side. The next night at dinner, I met a dog and his two owners who were serving time for their six-month probations out of the Colorado Springs penitentiary. Widowed mothers brought their kids to play with us, an older couple brought their voices to serenade us, but my favorite story came from an unattached Texan towards the end of the week. Italian Toni had been in New Orleans for about five months and had only just become a Christian for seven more. As one of the Chapel bands played for the crowd, we began to slightly shout at each other as we swapped stories. After the rudimentary facts were established, I took a backseat to speaking and got to listen to his testimony. Although the situation could have been deemed awkward because it was so loud, the energy from him shouting about God’s great love for us and his regrets for ‘wasting’ 40 years of his life in the shadows of that insight made for one of the most moving sermons I have ever heard. His passionate speech about how everything wrong in the world can be seen right if people just accept “good ol’ JC” (as he put it) was truly inspiring. After hearing about and witnessing one destroyed life after another, his speech could have single-handedly turned around anyone’s life. Go back to New Orleans Spring Break main page.
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Our first day there, we met a construction worker from Missouri who was pleasantly talking of his three-month stay for the first five minutes. The next 15 minutes was devoted to his attempted suicide and reliance on God to keep him from another one.