It has been a very long week. What began as a one-day effort to clean up and recover in our area quickly morphed into an every-day effort to get supplies and relief to all the affected areas of western North Carolina. Hurricane Helene ravaged the area in unfathomable ways, but God’s people all over have risen to the occasion to bring rescue, relief and restoration.
I did not know that our church was going to become a local hub, receiving and transporting food, water and other needed supplies to the mountains. God knew, and he has made it work. Our family life building, The Hope Center, has seen mountains of supplies pass back and forth through its doors, and both our church trailer and many of the personal trailers of our people have headed to Hendersonville, Asheville, Swannanoa, Fair View and many other places.
It has been pretty eye-opening. In a disaster this large, I would have expected to see large amounts of people and help from state and federal sources, and that has simply not been the case as I write this. It has pretty well exclusively been a huge number of local churches, citizens and also Samaritan’s Purse that have been getting the job done.
Pastor Mike Rogers and Gashes Creek Baptist Church in Asheville particularly stand out to me. We have carried probably 80% of our supplies up to them and then joined to help them carry them into every community. Pastor Doug Raynes and his sweet people at Progress Baptist in Hendersonville have also done yeomen’s work.
Going into some of the affected areas has been breathtaking. We pulled a trailer of supplies down a barely there mud path that just a week earlier was a paved, two-lane state road. Had my truck not been four-wheel drive, there is no way we could have made it. And what we saw when we got there was amazing. An entire community of mostly older folks, basically cut off since none of them seemed to have four-wheel drives, had banded together to survive. They were using a flat-top griddle in the center of the neighborhood to cook for everyone and then had rigged up a pipe to carry water from a natural spring to provide cleaning and flushing water for everyone.