Basking in the waters of our baptism!

Another report from Lois Kadel’s trip to Mississippi….
November 6, 2006

It’s been a very wet day on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It began raining really hard when we arrived at the home of Miss Jennifer, a surgery technician at the Kessler Naval Air Station. Miss Jennifer, a young officer with a twelve year old son, lives in a very nice development in Fountainbleu, MS, a small rural town outside of Ocean Springs between Gautier and Pascagoula. Miss Jennifer’s home was submerged under 9 feet of water on August 29, 2006. The house was uninhabitable for over a year. Miss Jennifer and her son rehabbed their small garage with the help of Miss Jennifer’s parents. She lived in that small space while work was started on her home. Miss Jennifer received an insurance check which was stolen by an unscrupulous contractor who deposited it into his account, did some sub-standard work and then disappeared. She finally has a court date scheduled to confront him in court. However, without the insurance money she has been unable to get the needed work completed on her home.

Volunteer work crews from Camp Victor have been working week by week to bring restoration to Miss Jennifer and her son. She is now within sight of having all the work completed. Our assignment today was to install bathroom sinks and connect the faucets. The house has only one source of running water – the bathtub. No kitchen sink, no bathroom sinks, no showers. Just one tub! And that is where dishes are washed, teeth brushed, water drawn for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. I can’t imagine living in a home without running water in the kitchen!

Ted, Denise and I worked all day on the plumbing project. There were many challenges but we prevailed! By the time Miss Jennifer returned from work, we had successfully connected the one bathroom and turned the water on. Miss Jennifer stood in the doorway of the bathroom and exclaimed, “I can’t believe how beautiful running water is!” The day had been filled with the usual first day of work types of glitches, starts and stops. But we all basked in the warmth of Miss Jennifer’s pure joy at watching the running water stream from that faucet. We left the house filled with a sense of accomplishment and awe at the patience of this one little family – living in a shell of a house for over a year without the fundamental functioning faucet. Ted shook his head as he mused out loud, “It puts things into perspective for me. It’s been fifteen months and life has still not returned to normal for these people!”

We drove back to Camp Victor in a driving rain. There was a tornado watch for the area 10.5 miles southwest of Vancleeve, MS. That is exactly where we were! Once again I was in a van imagining living through that awful day in August 2005 when wind and water rose up to drown the spirit of the Gulf Coast. But it didn’t happen. Although all is not well here, the spirit of the coast is strong. We drive past houses which are clearly in the middle of re-building. We see homes that have been made whole, families returned to life without construction or FEMA trailers. There are still many homes yet to be re-built, but the effort continues. Over 6,500 volunteers have come through the doors of Christus Victor and Camp Victor in the past year and they continue to come. The spirit of God is sweeping across the coast bathing its occupants with a pool of living water that is incomprehensible in its size and strength.

In Max Lucado’s book It’s Not About Me, he writes about an underground lake, a cavern of crystalline water known as Edwards Aquifer. Lucado tells how locals know about the cavern’s length, its layout, the purity of its water. They know it irrigates farms, fills pools, quenches thirst. But for everything they do know, there is one thing they do not know – they do not know its size – its depth or number of gallons. It is unmeasured. No one knows the amount of water the aquifer contains. Lucado writes, “Bring to mind another pool? Not a pool of water but a pool of love. God’s love. Pure as April snow. One swallow slackens the thirsty throat and softens the crusty heart. Immerse a life in God’s love, and watch it emerge cleansed and changed. We know the impact of God’s love.”

We saw the impact of God’s love today in the pure joy of a young woman watching water flow freely from her faucet. We saw the impact of God’s love today as amateur plumbers tackled a job because they believed the gospel words that placed them in this place and trusted the promises of another source of living water that flowed freely on them at some other point in time. We left the jobsite in pouring rain, soaked to the bone with water. And do you know what? It didn’t bother us one bit. It was in fact, rather fitting. We were basking in the waters of our baptism! And let the people of God say AMEN!

God’s Peace,

Lois Kadel