On Palm Sunday in 1994 a tornado touched down near Ragland, Alabama and cut a trail to Rome, Georgia, demolishing hundreds of homes, destroying five church campuses, and taking 29 lives before leaving that area.
The unthinkable happened on the first day of Holy Week. Entire communities were in disarray. I lived in one of those communities hit hard by the storm. My home was one of those damaged by the storm. The church I served became a Disaster Relief Center. And we learned a lot of lessons.
The Williams Community is a rural settlement located about five miles northeast of the city limits of Jacksonville, Alabama. It’s a place where the church is still the center of community life and it boasts a general store where you can buy your overalls and work boots just a few aisles over from the sweet milk. The Williams Community began as a settlement of farmers and educators, and those influences are dominant to this day. With its picturesque pastoral landscape and its Mayberry-like hospitality, it would have been an appropriate setting for Norman Rockwell masterpieces had Rockwell lived in the south.
On March 27, 1994, church services ended at 11:00 a.m. Following services many families who would normally have eaten Sunday dinner at home had gone to a restaurant in town or to visit relatives on Palm Sunday. At 11:24 a massive barrel cloud tumbled over the horizon from Webster’s Chapel into the Williams Community steamrolling homes and carving a path that looked liked a clearing for a new highway. In the Williams Community lives were spared…some miraculously. In fact, one family who had taken shelter in a small bathroom, fell from their air-born home into a lake just seconds before remnants of the home slammed into a hillside.
But just up the road a piece a different story was unfolding. At 11:39, the F-4 tornado slammed the Goshen United Methodist Church while worship was in session collapsing the roof and taking 20 lives, mostly children.
Throughout that fateful afternoon, as emergency workers were scrambling to respond to calls and as local residents were digging out their neighbors, another wave of storms dumped several inches of rain on the area further hampering rescue and recovery efforts. When Monday dawned, residents were faced with a haunting reality. Life would never be the same. But for most, at least, life would continue.
Following that tornado, our community learned a lot about patience and perseverance. We learned a lot about grace and hope. We learned the importance of looking forward and not backward. We learned that our dreams trumped our nightmares. We learned a lot about faith and life.
Here are five of the crucial lessons our community learned after the Palm Sunday Tornado that helped us to move forward:
1. We learned that you have to grieve quickly, then get to work. Once the initial shock of the devastation has been absorbed, it's time to channel all of your energy to re-building and moving forward. Despite the grief over things lost, there is a unique kind of joy that arises when you begin dreaming of the new things you can build...together. And interestingly, the work of re-building had a healing effect.
2. We learned emphatically that God doesn’t exempt folks from tragedy just because they have faith. I remember someone asking me, “Pastor, why do you think God let that tornado hit five churches on Sunday morning?” Since I can’t imagine God sitting in heaven and pushing a “Create Tornado” button, then hitting “Send” to a specific address, I remember responding, “Try drawing a line 55 miles in any direction on an Alabama map without hitting at least five churches.” The Bible says something like “it rains on the just and the unjust.” Since most churches are comprised of some combination of just and unjust people, I take that to mean that there is no place or people group who are given a free pass from natural disasters.
3. We learned that when the going gets tough, people of faith mobilize and work together cooperatively. After the Palm Sunday Tornado, the First Baptist Church in the Williams Community served as a Red Cross Relief Center. We partnered with the Cherokee Electric Cooperative, Bellsouth, and FEMA, and each of them did admirable work, eventually. But we also hosted Builders for Christ, Campers on Mission, Mennonite Response Teams, Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief Teams, and a Latter-Day Saints Team. The volunteers from churches and faith-based groups organized quickly and went to work, while the professional and government groups were slowed by paperwork and red tape restrictions. I distinctly remember many of the professional workers who partnered with us telling me how they admired the work ethic, the productivity, and the cooperative spirit of the volunteer teams from churches and faith-based organizations.
4. All kinds of talents and skill levels are needed. We were fortunate to have a huge corps of skilled personnel who managed chain saws, dozers, cranes, and front-end loaders. However, we also needed folks to cook food, drive trucks, pick up debris, run errands, care for children, visit the elderly, sweep the floor, manage communications, and do household cleaning. In disaster relief, every job is important and every volunteer has something to offer. Never underestimate the importance of doing all the good you can, where you can, when you can.
5. Relief work builds community. We learned that remarkable bonding occurs in the field. The sense of community born among those who work together following a storm forges a spiritual kinship that lasts for a lifetime... or longer.
Seventeen years later, another wave of tornadoes has wreaked havoc across the state of Alabama, storms even more powerful and more destructive and more fatal than the tornado that struck on March 27. And one of these post-Easter tornadoes followed a similar path as the Palm Sunday storm of 1994 hitting Webster’s Chapel, the Williams Community, and Goshen.
People there are hurting, even grieving over the loss of life and the destruction of property. But those good rural people are not just weathered storm veterans. Like so many Alabamians, they are a determined, hard-working, and faith-filled people who do not back down from a challenge. They are already drying their tears, rolling up their sleeves, and getting ready to repair and rebuild, because there are some things deep inside that the strongest storm cannot destroy.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
A message from the pastor…
Overnight and today we are watching the horrific video footage following the devastating storms that trampled many communities in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia yesterday. Many of us have been busy contacting friends and family members to check on their safety. Others of us have already learned of friends who lost homes, businesses, and loved ones.
At our house, in addition to thinking about our many friends who were affected in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Cullman, Amanda and I are grieving over the destruction inflicted on the Williams Community, our former place of service, where at least two lives were taken and multiple homes were destroyed when one storm followed a similar path to the Palm Sunday tornado of 1994.
Our First Baptist Family is no stranger to storms. As veteran survivors of successive storms in recent years, we can identify with the grief, the loss, and the monumental challenges facing our neighboring states in the days ahead. Today I am calling on our First Baptist Family to respond in the following ways:
PRAY! Pray for those who are hurting and grieving. Homes can be rebuilt, but loved ones cannot be replaced. We serve a God who is "our refuge and strength, a very present help in our time of trouble." Pray for those whose lives were turned upside down to discover renewed hope in the aftermath of the storm, and pray for relief and recovery workers to labor with cooperation and perseverance.
GIVE! Consider giving a generous financial gift to assist with rebuilding following this disaster. Make your check to FBC Pensacola and designate it Disaster Relief. All gifts given through FBCP will be channeled through our existing mission partners in Alabama.
GO! In the days ahead, we will be assembling teams to assist with the relief work in Alabama. Today we are working with leaders in Alabama to assess the needs. We know that this will be a lengthy clean-up and rebuilding effort, much like the aftermath of Katrina. Our hope is to target a specific area for partnership. Stay tuned for opportunities to participate on a Disaster Relief Team in the weeks ahead.
I am honored to serve a loving, praying, and caring church family.
With continuing prayers for our neighbors,
Barry
At our house, in addition to thinking about our many friends who were affected in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Cullman, Amanda and I are grieving over the destruction inflicted on the Williams Community, our former place of service, where at least two lives were taken and multiple homes were destroyed when one storm followed a similar path to the Palm Sunday tornado of 1994.
Our First Baptist Family is no stranger to storms. As veteran survivors of successive storms in recent years, we can identify with the grief, the loss, and the monumental challenges facing our neighboring states in the days ahead. Today I am calling on our First Baptist Family to respond in the following ways:
PRAY! Pray for those who are hurting and grieving. Homes can be rebuilt, but loved ones cannot be replaced. We serve a God who is "our refuge and strength, a very present help in our time of trouble." Pray for those whose lives were turned upside down to discover renewed hope in the aftermath of the storm, and pray for relief and recovery workers to labor with cooperation and perseverance.
GIVE! Consider giving a generous financial gift to assist with rebuilding following this disaster. Make your check to FBC Pensacola and designate it Disaster Relief. All gifts given through FBCP will be channeled through our existing mission partners in Alabama.
GO! In the days ahead, we will be assembling teams to assist with the relief work in Alabama. Today we are working with leaders in Alabama to assess the needs. We know that this will be a lengthy clean-up and rebuilding effort, much like the aftermath of Katrina. Our hope is to target a specific area for partnership. Stay tuned for opportunities to participate on a Disaster Relief Team in the weeks ahead.
I am honored to serve a loving, praying, and caring church family.
With continuing prayers for our neighbors,
Barry
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
A Meditation on Friendship
by Barry Howard
A man that has friends must first show himself friendly; and there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother. Proverbs 18:24
The wisdom writer pre-supposes that for most of life, human beings are going to be engaged in dynamic human relationships. In a highly competitive world where individuals are dominated by self-interest, how do you keep relationships healthy and growing? Sustainable friendship is a gift from God.
What is a friend? One writer answered this way: Friends are people with whom you dare to be yourself. Your soul can be naked with them. They ask you to put on nothing, only to be what you are. They do not want you to be better or worse. When you are with them, you feel as a prisoner feels who has been declared innocent. You do not have to be on your guard. You can say what you think, as long as it is genuinely you. Friends understand those contradictions in your nature that lead others to misjudge you. With them you breathe freely. You can avow your little vanities and envies and hates and vicious sparks, your meannesses and absurdities, and in opening them up to friends, they are lost, dissolved on the white ocean of their loyalty. They understand. You do not have to be careful. You can abuse them, neglect them, tolerate them. Best of all, you can keep still with them. It makes no matter. They like you. They are like fire that purges to the bone. They understand. You can weep with them, sing with them, laugh with them, pray with them. Through it all--and underneath--they see, know, and love you. A friend? What is a friend? Just one, I repeat, with whom you dare to be yourself.
Churches are built on both faith and friendship. Members of a congregation are actually diverse friends from a variety of backgrounds who stick together in tough times, who bring out the best in each other, and who collaborate in missional effort, despite their differences, out of obedience to a common faith conviction.
Maybe, the Quakers have it right in referring to their faith community as “The Society of Friends.”
During these days of learning to bring out the best in others, treasure the friendships you have, and look forward to making new friends in the days ahead. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “So long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
Maintaining a good friendship requires grace, mercy, patience, and perseverance. E.C. McKenzie observed that “some people make enemies instead of friends because it is less trouble.” I contend that true friendship is worth the labor.
(Barry Howard serves as senior minister of the First Baptist Church of Pensacola.)
A man that has friends must first show himself friendly; and there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother. Proverbs 18:24
The wisdom writer pre-supposes that for most of life, human beings are going to be engaged in dynamic human relationships. In a highly competitive world where individuals are dominated by self-interest, how do you keep relationships healthy and growing? Sustainable friendship is a gift from God.
What is a friend? One writer answered this way: Friends are people with whom you dare to be yourself. Your soul can be naked with them. They ask you to put on nothing, only to be what you are. They do not want you to be better or worse. When you are with them, you feel as a prisoner feels who has been declared innocent. You do not have to be on your guard. You can say what you think, as long as it is genuinely you. Friends understand those contradictions in your nature that lead others to misjudge you. With them you breathe freely. You can avow your little vanities and envies and hates and vicious sparks, your meannesses and absurdities, and in opening them up to friends, they are lost, dissolved on the white ocean of their loyalty. They understand. You do not have to be careful. You can abuse them, neglect them, tolerate them. Best of all, you can keep still with them. It makes no matter. They like you. They are like fire that purges to the bone. They understand. You can weep with them, sing with them, laugh with them, pray with them. Through it all--and underneath--they see, know, and love you. A friend? What is a friend? Just one, I repeat, with whom you dare to be yourself.
Churches are built on both faith and friendship. Members of a congregation are actually diverse friends from a variety of backgrounds who stick together in tough times, who bring out the best in each other, and who collaborate in missional effort, despite their differences, out of obedience to a common faith conviction.
Maybe, the Quakers have it right in referring to their faith community as “The Society of Friends.”
During these days of learning to bring out the best in others, treasure the friendships you have, and look forward to making new friends in the days ahead. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “So long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
Maintaining a good friendship requires grace, mercy, patience, and perseverance. E.C. McKenzie observed that “some people make enemies instead of friends because it is less trouble.” I contend that true friendship is worth the labor.
(Barry Howard serves as senior minister of the First Baptist Church of Pensacola.)
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Holy Week: Feel the Passion!
By Barry Howard
Next week is called Holy Week, not because we are to “act” holy, but because it is a most appropriate week for us to re-visit the passion of Christ. Around the globe, Christ-followers and other inquirers will be reflecting on the events leading up to the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What is the significance of Holy Week and how can I probe its deeper meaning?
Our tradition of observing Holy Week seems to have originated in the East, emerging out of the practice of pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Each day of Holy Week is significant. For those of us whose faith was shaped in a Baptist tradition, at least four days call for guided reflection. Palm Sunday is a day to revisit the royal welcome extended to Jesus by the curious crowd as he entered Jerusalem. On Maundy Thursday believers recall the occasion when Jesus washed the feet of the disciples as he gave them a new mandate to love and serve. On Maundy Thursday evening, many faith communities re-enact “the last supper” when Jesus broke bread and shared the cup with his disciples by receiving the elements of communion. Good Friday is an occasion to feel the passion of Christ and to think on the enormity of his suffering. And Resurrection Sunday, or Easter, is a festive day to celebrate and proclaim that “Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed!”
Because of the sequential significance of these events, Holy Week is best approached slowly, with an attitude of reverent exploration, a spiritual mood of sacred awe. In Weldon Gaddy’s book, The Gift of Worship, he describes our opportunity to engage in a more meaningful experience of the passion of Christ: “Holy Week services bring into focus dimensions of discipleship that are missed completely by a simple leap from Palm Sunday to Easter. Worship services which take seriously the truths of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday please God because they challenge a greater commitment and a more effective ministry among the people of God.”
This year as you begin your spiritual journey through Holy Week, open your senses and your imagination to both the tragedy and the triumph of this pivotal week in history. Take time to listen to the voices of the crowd as Jesus enters the city. Hear again the teachings of Jesus and contemplate his days in Jerusalem. Feel the water touch your feet, taste the morsel of bread on your tongue and the sip of wine rolling over your lips. Sense the disgust of his betrayal by a friend. Smell the stench of the scourge and hear the mocking sarcasm of the trial. Grieve over the cruel injustice of his execution and experience the passion of his incomprehensible suffering. And ultimately…consider the mysterious power of the resurrection and the hope generated by the notion that life invested in Christ cannot be extinguished, even by the reality of death.
The events of Holy Week invite and motivate us to follow Jesus, not out of religious obligation or fear of eternal damnation, but because we identify with his teaching and his vision, and we discover a sense of belonging in his cause and his kingdom. A slow and deliberate journey through Holy Week may re-energize your faith and inspire you to live and serve with passion.
The word “holy” means “belonging to a divine power” or “dedicated to God.” On second thought, maybe Holy Week is a week for us to “act” in a way that is holy.
(Barry Howard serves as senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida.)
Next week is called Holy Week, not because we are to “act” holy, but because it is a most appropriate week for us to re-visit the passion of Christ. Around the globe, Christ-followers and other inquirers will be reflecting on the events leading up to the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What is the significance of Holy Week and how can I probe its deeper meaning?
Our tradition of observing Holy Week seems to have originated in the East, emerging out of the practice of pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Each day of Holy Week is significant. For those of us whose faith was shaped in a Baptist tradition, at least four days call for guided reflection. Palm Sunday is a day to revisit the royal welcome extended to Jesus by the curious crowd as he entered Jerusalem. On Maundy Thursday believers recall the occasion when Jesus washed the feet of the disciples as he gave them a new mandate to love and serve. On Maundy Thursday evening, many faith communities re-enact “the last supper” when Jesus broke bread and shared the cup with his disciples by receiving the elements of communion. Good Friday is an occasion to feel the passion of Christ and to think on the enormity of his suffering. And Resurrection Sunday, or Easter, is a festive day to celebrate and proclaim that “Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed!”
Because of the sequential significance of these events, Holy Week is best approached slowly, with an attitude of reverent exploration, a spiritual mood of sacred awe. In Weldon Gaddy’s book, The Gift of Worship, he describes our opportunity to engage in a more meaningful experience of the passion of Christ: “Holy Week services bring into focus dimensions of discipleship that are missed completely by a simple leap from Palm Sunday to Easter. Worship services which take seriously the truths of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday please God because they challenge a greater commitment and a more effective ministry among the people of God.”
This year as you begin your spiritual journey through Holy Week, open your senses and your imagination to both the tragedy and the triumph of this pivotal week in history. Take time to listen to the voices of the crowd as Jesus enters the city. Hear again the teachings of Jesus and contemplate his days in Jerusalem. Feel the water touch your feet, taste the morsel of bread on your tongue and the sip of wine rolling over your lips. Sense the disgust of his betrayal by a friend. Smell the stench of the scourge and hear the mocking sarcasm of the trial. Grieve over the cruel injustice of his execution and experience the passion of his incomprehensible suffering. And ultimately…consider the mysterious power of the resurrection and the hope generated by the notion that life invested in Christ cannot be extinguished, even by the reality of death.
The events of Holy Week invite and motivate us to follow Jesus, not out of religious obligation or fear of eternal damnation, but because we identify with his teaching and his vision, and we discover a sense of belonging in his cause and his kingdom. A slow and deliberate journey through Holy Week may re-energize your faith and inspire you to live and serve with passion.
The word “holy” means “belonging to a divine power” or “dedicated to God.” On second thought, maybe Holy Week is a week for us to “act” in a way that is holy.
(Barry Howard serves as senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida.)
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