They Will Rebuild the Ruined Cities...
As I drove through the streets of the once populated and bustling city of New Orleans, I gained a new perspective of God’s mighty and sovereign power. A community that only a few months ago was going about their everyday activities of gardening, making school lunches, and commuting back and forth to their places of employment, is now stark, desolate, and simply a ruined city. The voices of the children were still and the smell of the crawfish and gumbo was distant. It was a ghost town. Weeds were overtaking homes like a disease, while cars lay upside down in ditches. Every door and window from each home was blown away while roofs crumbled into the streets and water gutters were torn into small scraps of metal. Trees were uprooted and shops closed for good. Amidst the weeds you could see a bright orange “X” painted on every door of every home in the city. In each corner of the “X” was a symbol or number. The 4 figures represented the branch of army that checked the home, the date the home was checked, the number of persons or animals rescued, and the bottom triangle represented the number of persons found dead. It reminded me of the time I walked through the holocaust camps at Auschwitz. That cold, eerie, unsettled feeling of injustice. It was devastating.
Yet somehow, I still felt God’s presence. I felt his indescribable peace, and feared his awesome power. And then I read from Psalm 30, “The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord is enthroned as King forever”.
My team and I couldn’t help from asking the normal questions about Hurricane Katrina. Did God create this destruction? Did God plan this hurricane? How has God used this for His glory? We never could fully answer these questions but we did conclude that God is a good God and his mighty power is never for us to scrutinize.
As I watched each youth group labor intensely at their work site, whether it was at VBS or a construction site, gardening, or simply praying with people, I was reminded of the prophet Isaiah’s message when he claimed that “…they will come and renew the ruined cities”. Perhaps our team of 50 youth and a few AIM leaders had come for such a time as this, to meet the needs of the people in the city and be a part of the prophecy to begin renewing the ruined cities. Although our labor seemed small compared to the needs, and our trip seemed short, I am confident that God used us in mighty ways to bring his message of love to New Orleans. It was a very powerful trip.
