These inspirational stories by Bill Keeler, as shared with Dana Lamb, are offered in loving memory of Dr. Bob Collier, David Lloyd, John Biddle, and Henry Paris — whose lives continue to inspire.
Having worked in the East Tennessee Presbytery, I was able to do some quick networking, helping to pull a work crew together, thus arriving in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, just nine weeks after Hurricane Katrina had hit. In November 2005, our church van and Dr. Collier’s tool-loaded pickup truck arrived at the eerily dark Bay Saint Louis Presbyterian Church.
A strong mold and mildew odor hit us in the face as the 12 of us (8 from our church and 4 from other Presbyterian churches) exited the van. After some introductions, the women settled in behind the church altar to sleep, as the men went next door to a very nice (virtually untouched by Katrina) B&B. Those sleeping arrangements soon changed when the women found out the men were in a more luxurious space.
Although we got off to a slow start that first day, we began mucking out a house, only to find that, because of mold and structural damage, the house should have been torn down. What to do next?
It was then that we were directed to the Bay St. Louis Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) area representative, who took us to a site where trees needed to be cut and removed. We began cutting until we reached a tall, leaning tree that was partially lodged in another tree. Dr. Bob said, “It would take a bucket truck to do this job.” Miraculously, a bucket truck from a neighboring utility company happened by, stopped, and cut the tree down. These kinds of miracles, mercy angels, and Dr. Bob’s band-aid doctoring would take us far that first week.
An unlikely mercy angel was a Pentecostal minister who, by his own admission, had spent half of his life in jail. Brother Bennie Hartley was a traveling evangelist from a church in North Carolina. Putting together some building supplies and tools, he had rushed down to the Gulf to find that what people needed first was food; so he quickly called his church to send food, cooking utensils, etc.
Soon, Brother Bennie had parked his trailer truck in a parking lot of a hurricane-destroyed grocery store where he fed and evangelized to people in need. By the time we got there, he had assembled a large “rag-tag” following of former drug addicts and generally rough-living converts. The story he told was that he tried to take some of his converts to different Protestant churches in the area, but they were refused. Someone told Brother Bennie, “Take them to the Presbyterian Church – they’ll take anybody.”
That’s where we met him, and it was Brother Bennie who led us to the home of Jimmy and Robin Lamy and their family, who would become lifetime friends. Brother Bennie was also the man who supplied sheetrock when we couldn’t find any elsewhere – he had somehow assembled a tractor-trailer load that he had stored in the parking lot of the destroyed Walmart store.
Although at the beginning, our crew had done a variety of work, in the end, we mostly did sheetrock type of work – hanging sheetrock and mudding – getting ready for the next mission crew who came along. Dr. Bob did most of the planning of that. Lyn Oakley and I rounded up food for our crew (traveling many miles to the only food store, a Walmart). There was a job for anyone who wanted to help.
Tomorrow, we will share Part II of “The Miracles from the Gulf after Katrina”
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