Loading...It has been a week of ripping down walls, ripping up floors, shoveling mud and debris, and trying to be a good listener to people who have lost everything or, at best, just about everything.
I asked my friend John Shirley about his experiences helping recent flood recovery efforts in his community. His reply to my questions (below) was a powerful reminder of Grace in our midst, ALL the time. John is a member of St. Paul's/Bloomsburg, and is a student in our Dicoesan School of Christian Studies.
~Susan Hinton
St. Paul's/Wellsboro
.... There is still so much more to do, and it breaks my heart that I have to return to my “normal” week and can’t help more. It’s just been a lot of work; it hurts to see people hurting so badly.
What is the sight, sound, smell, feeling that has stuck with you the most? The smell that sticks with me the most – river sludge, mold, mildew, and Clorox. Sounds of saws, hammers, people crying, people yelling, people laughing, people grasping for words that they cannot formulate at this moment.
What was the most inspiring thing you witnessed/experienced, in all of it? This answer is ongoing. I have seen/am seeing this community pull together in such a amazingly beautiful way. People who lost their homes, vehicles, and-- in a few cases-- family members are putting the least amongst us before themselves; I am seeing age-old barriers between people/groups of people being broken to assist and rebuild our beautiful Victorian college town.
What did you do that you did not know you could do? I don’t know that I can answer this completely – only because it has been such an enormous week of constant work. But I didn’t realize I was “pastoring” people until I saw a bunch of University faculty standing off to my side, when I was just letting an elderly couple cry and vent to me. When it was all said and done, the group of seven faculty members came up to me, and gave me a hug. We are all equal in this mess, and I like the equality right now-- no rich or poor, educated or uneducated, clean or dirty, Presbyterian or Catholic, university persons or town persons... we are all ONE in this. That type of unity takes my breath away-- to see how we have thrown all of those divisions, titles, and class conflicts away, to achieve one goal: to help, care, love, and provide.
Where do you see Jesus? Right now, everywhere –
I see the crucified Christ: on the faces of the elderly that lost their lifetime of memories, the dirty little kids using their sandbox buckets to scoop mud off their family’s first floors or basements, the fatigued and worn bodies of people that have no idea where they will live, if their insurance will cover their losses, or if FEMA has the funds to assist.
BUT, at the exact same moment I see the Resurrected and Transfigured Christ in the volunteers, the community involvement, the genuine care for the least amongst us.
I see the Victorious Christ trampling the death of natural disasters, in the bus-loads of people coming every day from all over the state, in the Salvation Army people feeding those that have no food, in the out-of-state university students coming back JUST TO HELP, in Red Cross and Geisinger Health System offering free tetanus vaccinations.
These experiences and images are so very Eucharistic to me – The Fraction, and through the fraction, The Salvation.
