Editor’s Note: If you’ve been around seeJesus for long, you know we have a passion for “seeing the saints” – the ordinary men and women in the church living lives of quiet love and service to others. Churches following the standard liturgical calendar have a day set aside to honor saints on November 1. In that spirit, we want to encourage your faith with this glimpse of saints at work in response to Hurricane Helene, written by our own Michele Walton, who lives in Spartanburg, SC, and is pictured here working with Samaritan's Purse.
If you live in Upstate South Carolina, harvest season means Sunday afternoon drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway, vivid displays of fall foliage, bushels of local apples, and sticky fingers from hot apple cider doughnuts. Western North Carolina—with mountain towns like Chimney Rock and Lake Lure—is a home away from home for my family, especially in the fall. My husband proposed to me 14 years ago on a little bench at Lake Lure. One year ago today, we snuck our then 2nd-grade son out of school for an impromptu trip to these mountain towns.
Hurricane Helene did not retreat before she devastated many of these towns, including Lake Lure. I cannot report death tolls or damages, neither of which are finally assessed, or answers to the questions I find myself asking God in the early morning hours. But I can offer Psalm 29:11, “The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD is enthroned as King forever. The LORD gives strength to his people; the LORD blesses his people with peace.”
(via NC Outdoor Adventures, September 29, 2024)
I appreciate the juxtaposition of these verses in Helene’s aftermath. Many want to speculate as to why this disaster happened and who could have mitigated it. The Psalmist says plainly that God is sovereign in these matters. But he says, too, that this same God gives strength to his people and blesses them with peace.
If you pick up the phone and call any church within 100 miles of here and ask, “How are your people helping?” you will get a heartening answer. Christians with trucks or chainsaws or able bodies are serving in Jesus’ name. Christians with none of those tools are funding and sending others to serve. All of us are praying.
Though my own community was spared from flooding, we have millions of dollars’ worth of damage, a few intersections without functioning traffic lights (three weeks later), and condemned houses littered throughout the city. My small church has done tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cleanup work on the north side of Spartanburg.
When church buildings and programs are laid low, you see the glory of the saints more clearly -- everyday people pouring out the love of Christ in sweat, tears, prayers, and money.
Here, in North Carolina, and presumably in every place Helene stamped her feet, the number of seemingly insignificant, spontaneous ministries of the church has exploded. A few elderly women collecting quarters to do laundry for linemen; a mom organizing clothing drops according to the specific needs of families in a hard-hit area; countless men, women, and teens spending a day (or a week!) helping Samaritan’s Purse muck houses; and untold hours’ worth of prayers from saints of every stripe. I see the Lord giving strength to people just like me, who lack some part of what it takes to pick muddy Magna-Tiles out of the fireplaces of hastily abandoned homes and sift through endless soggy debris piles on our own.
I spoke recently with some old friends operating an impromptu mission out of a Keller Williams real estate office in Waynesville, North Carolina, taking off-road vehicles high into the mountains to reach otherwise inaccessible people. Do you know what these people—people who had lost all their worldly possessions—were requesting from my friends? Bibles! Rest assured that the Christians around them and even the team at Crossway Books quickly stepped in with cases and cases of Bibles, freeing the relief team to buy more propane and heaters for families struggling to stay warm in the crisp mountain air. What a picture of believers comforting others with the comfort they have received from Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:4)!
In A Praying Church, Paul Miller describes people like these as “saints in motion, doing Jesus in small but costly and potentially powerful ways” (48). All around me, I see the saints doing this work of ministry, building up the body of Christ and participating in God’s work of making things new. When church buildings and programs (not to mention public services and infrastructure) are laid low, you see the glory of the saints more clearly–everyday people pouring out the love of Christ in sweat, tears, prayers, and money. It’s like a harvest of saints, being gathered up and used as God’s provision and blessing for others. He is lord of the harvest in every season.
