Oct
13
I spent the last week in Joplin, MO for a week of training and it was amazing. It was great to see the other young people who are doing this same internship as me from around the state of Missouri. We grew a lot in our friendships over the week and had some great times of worship and intense conversations. It was a long week, but I would say everyone came away with a deeper understanding of God and themselves.
For the weekend about 70 other college aged people joined us and we went out to serve the community. The Joplin area was hit with a tornado in May and there were still some families who needed a bunch of help rebuilding and clearing debris on their property. Where I went we spent all day just cutting up fallen trees and hauling them to either a pile of firewood or a pile of brush. The property we were on was out in the country and from what it looks like had a good sized forest behind their house. We estimated that we cut up 25 trees in the time we were there and still did not completely clear this family's property.
When we arrived I got to have a great conversation with the woman who owned the house. She told me the story about that day the tornado hit and I was amazed at the fact that her and her family survived, let alone that their house was still even half there. Even if she didn't realize it, God was definitely there. She told me things like "I don't know why, but I just had a feeling that the roof was going to collapse in a certain area, so I yelled to my cousin to move to a different room and sure enough a tree fell right where she had been and the roof caved in." She also told me about how they hadn't gone to the basement (the place where you would normally go in a tornado), but stayed upstairs, and that actually saved their lives. I guess a door had been blown in downstairs and if they had gone down there the suction would have pulled them from the house and into the storm. Things like that aren't a coincidence. God was moving there and he was saving them.
Now I'm back in St. Louis and into the flow of normality once again. I hope that I can remember God's power in what He displayed through those storms now in the every day and apply all I have learned this past week to my life here.
For the weekend about 70 other college aged people joined us and we went out to serve the community. The Joplin area was hit with a tornado in May and there were still some families who needed a bunch of help rebuilding and clearing debris on their property. Where I went we spent all day just cutting up fallen trees and hauling them to either a pile of firewood or a pile of brush. The property we were on was out in the country and from what it looks like had a good sized forest behind their house. We estimated that we cut up 25 trees in the time we were there and still did not completely clear this family's property.
When we arrived I got to have a great conversation with the woman who owned the house. She told me the story about that day the tornado hit and I was amazed at the fact that her and her family survived, let alone that their house was still even half there. Even if she didn't realize it, God was definitely there. She told me things like "I don't know why, but I just had a feeling that the roof was going to collapse in a certain area, so I yelled to my cousin to move to a different room and sure enough a tree fell right where she had been and the roof caved in." She also told me about how they hadn't gone to the basement (the place where you would normally go in a tornado), but stayed upstairs, and that actually saved their lives. I guess a door had been blown in downstairs and if they had gone down there the suction would have pulled them from the house and into the storm. Things like that aren't a coincidence. God was moving there and he was saving them.
Now I'm back in St. Louis and into the flow of normality once again. I hope that I can remember God's power in what He displayed through those storms now in the every day and apply all I have learned this past week to my life here.
