Blog

by Steve Risner

This is a continuation of the story of how my wife and I responded to the call to provide aid to Houston, Texas after hurricane Harvey ravaged the area. You can pick up part one here. I'll pick up where I left off…

Chase over at Findlay Warehousing had a contact that donated an entire pallet full of pancake mix, a pallet of Jiffy peanut butter, and a pallet of Smucker's grape jelly. We also received a floor buffer from the Tiffin Mall. We collected, with the generosity of the community and the grace of God, over 100 gallons of bleach, hundreds of pairs of work gloves, thousands of pairs of rubber gloves, 500-600 cases of water, a pallet of Gatorade, near 100 gallons of laundry detergent, several pallets full of food, and much more.

The truck was set to leave Wednesday morning. After Rob, the driver, got all the clearance and weighed, he had 78,000 lbs of stuff on his trailer—and there were 4 pallets of stuff left over! So Michelle and I had our original plan come back around to us—we would fill a pickup truck and trailer. I had a hard time finding a trailer I could borrow, so a generous local business owner, Jeff, paid the cost of renting a trailer from U-Haul. Michelle and I picked up a trailer, got loaded at Findlay Warehousing, and set sail on Thursday afternoon after a morning at work. We got by with closing our office for only a day and half. My estimation was that the semi would be in Houston in the early afternoon on Friday. However, I received a call from our driver, Rob, at about 5pm. “I'm about 2 hours from Houston and wondered where you were,” he said. I just sorta laughed and said, “I'm in Indiana—about 16 or more hours away.” He told me that was fine. He needed to take his 10 hour break. He'd get up early and get on the road to beat the rush hour traffic of the 4th largest city in the country. Because of this, however, it made me feel like we couldn't stop driving. Aside from restroom breaks and gas, we didn't really stop at all until we made it to the Worship Center the next morning at about 9:30am, after 21-22 hours.

When we arrived, we saw the truck was about 1/3 of the way unloaded and the guys working on it were having a tough time. The truck was loaded at a warehouse, so getting a fork lift in and out was easy. But plans to have the truck unloaded at another warehouse fell through. We had a fork lift, but all the pallets needed to be brought to the back of the trailer so they could be unloaded. Pallet jacks made this much easier, but the building materials refused to cooperate. The drywall, placed in the middle of the trailer, wasn't set high enough off of the floor of the trailer for a pallet jack to be used. This meant each pair of drywall sheets needed to be lifted overhead and set gently down on the pallet jack. That was hard work in the Houston heat and even more so in the metal box we were working in! Once the drywall was out, the remainder of the pallets came out easily enough until we reached the front of the trailer where we found two large bundles of 2x4's—588 in total. These too were not set high enough for the jack to be of use, so we had to use our heads. That didn't go well! We broke open the top bundle and drug the 294 boards to the fork lift and restacked them. The bottom bundle was a little better. I asked if we had any ratchet straps. The idea was to latch on to the bundle and use the fork lift to pull it to the back of the trailer. It took about the same amount of time as dragging the boards to the open doors of the trailer, but no one had to touch the boards, so I called it a win.

The church staff and those helping out seemed very appreciative for the generosity of those who contributed to this effort. Pastor Kellen, our contact at the Worship Center, told us there were 67 families they were planning to help who had contacted them seeking aid. These families had a partial to total loss of everything they owned and most were without insurance. It was stressed that a great number of these families suffered a total loss. While we were unloading the truck, in just the 4 hours we were at the church working, two more families stopped by to ask for assistance. A week later, as I was in communication with Pastor Kellen, he informed me that after the families they had originally committed to helping came through and got what they needed, they opened up the supplies to a much broader base. Over 500 families were able to come through and be blessed by the efforts of the Church. It broke our hearts to not be able to dedicate the time to helping these families at their homes with clean up and rebuilding. We were just not able to stay long enough to get involved that way. My brother-in-law's mission focused more on service while ours focused on delivering needed supplies.

After leaving Houston on Saturday morning around 11am, Michelle and I headed towards home. On the trip down, we went from Ohio to Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and finally into Arkansas before getting into Texas. For the trip home, we decided to travel along the gulf more to see the aftermath of Harvey. We traveled through Beaumont, TX, which was ravaged by this record setting storm as well. The trip from Houston to Beaumont was about 90 min. The entire way there we could see neighborhood after neighborhood gutted and ripped apart. One pile of the contents of these homes stretched for nearly 200 yards, in my estimation, and stood at least as tall as a man. Looking down streets as we drove by, we could see both sides of the street piled high from end to end with the internal contents of so many homes. I'm sure many of these homes will never be lived in again. And to think that many of these families are without insurance to cover the damages is heart breaking. We noticed a farm that had a fence with straw snagged on it all along it for nearly half a mile. This straw line was about 2 ½ feet off the ground! As we approached the end of the fence, we found a large, amorphous heap of round straw bales jumbled together. These bales are often well over 500 lbs each and they were tossed into this mess by the rushing flood waters. I can't imagine witnessing that.

This is why we were called. This is what the church is supposed to be doing—helping. I read an article published shortly before our trip that stated that 80% of the aid going to Texas and to Florida was from the Church and that FEMA was lagging behind terribly. If you supported us in any way during this trip, you were part of that statistic! Thank you so much for the help and for supporting us in this endeavor. It was truly a privilege to be a part of this and we count ourselves blessed to serve.

The Church is called to be a light in a dark place; the world is a dark place. After a terrible event such as these hurricanes or tornadoes or other tragic events either natural or unnatural, we need to mobilize. I've seen lately that many people, especially on social media, revel in complaining. They live for it. They post article after article (many of which are editorial pieces masquerading as news or are unsubstantiated news articles) and make grievances. I find, in my experience, that such people have no interest in helping fix the problems they are so excited to voice their opinions on. I believe they are rarely actually interested or concerned with the problems they're referencing, but just want to complain, nothing more. We're not called to complain. We're called to help. Complaints don't fix devastated areas; actions do. Rather than registering your complaint online, why not pick up a hammer, send an envelope with a check inside, or drive to the area and get your hands dirty? Be the change rather than just being an irritant. If you simply cannot do any these things, you are all capable of prayer. Whether we get involved or not, we should be in prayer over these matters. I believe prayer got the semi-truck Findlay Warehousing donated filled over capacity, that it got my wife and I safely to Houston and back without any real issues, and that it'll bring peace to a these devastated areas.

I’m looking forward to what God has for us in the future. I feel a door may have just opened. Pray for us, friends, as we consider the future and what God may call us and you to do.

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