Not Immune...

One of the questions my wife and I ask each other every so often is the rhetorical, "If you could live anywhere in the country, where would you want to live...?" I say 'rhetorical' because we always seem to come back to New England. Why? California...too many mudslides and earthquakes. Alabama and the Midwest, too many tornadoes. Florida....hurricanes (and alligators!). Carolinas....bugs, hot and bugs. Southwest...hot, droughts. Texas...wildfires. People think of New England and all they think is snowy winter and it's cold. Well, we can handle a little cold; just put on another sweater and a log on the fire. Snow? Well, that's what they make snow blowers for, right? Piece of cake!

We are not immune from natural disasters. The last month or so it has been very rainy, and the snow melt from a tough winter means the rivers and lakes have been overflowing. Lake Champlain is at the highest recorded levels ever. A boy I taught in High School paid for an ill-advised fishing trip with his life, last month. The shoreline in Georgia and St. Albans, all the way up through Swanton has many flooded areas and alot of people's houses and cabins are swamped. Today, there is a tornado warning (my Midwest trained children are not impressed). Things got bad enough that the Red Cross set up an emergency shelter in the St. Albans Educational Center.

We as a church are active in helping with disaster relief through Nazarene Disaster Response, in such areas as Louisiana (Hurricane Katrina), Haiti (earthquake), Indonesia (Tsunami), Japan (tsunami) and others. We put together Crisis Care Kits and take offerings. We truly DO care about these people whom we will probably never meet.

All of that said, what did we as a church do for our immediate community? Nothing. So, at our last Board Meeting we discussed the situation and said, "What do we do NEXT time"? Lesson learned. We are not immune to disaster. But how can we help in times like this? That is still to be determined; we need to contact some people, take assessment of our facility and such, and make some plans. It has not been crucial this time, but next time it could be.

If the senior housing center next door needs to be evacuated, a family gets burned out, the hospital around the corner needs overflow space or we do have a major tornado...we need to be ready. We are part of the community. We need to be ready to act, and be ready to bless someone whom we will see eye to eye...not just on a missions DVD.

.