Picking Up Sticks

We spent the day picking up sticks.  At five different homes, all in the Blue Mountain area just outside of New Albany, Mississippi.  And there are a lot of sticks to pick up.  This place is one huge mess.  A lot of work has been done already, but there is a lot more to go.

We started out right away with an orientation at the First Methodist Church in New Albany.  Everyone had their orange shirts, we sat through a safety presentation, and we were divided in to teams.  Deb and I were put with a team that had already been working together for a day or so, so we had a little catching up to do.  People from all over the states, California, Wyoming, Ohio, Michigan (of course), and others.  From teenagers to mid-70’s, it was quite a diverse group.

The first few jobs were rather small--yards littered with sticks and branches and lots of limbs hanging broken from trees which had to come down.  These were all piled up to be picked up later.

One of the main reasons for these efforts is a chance to talk to the homeowners, show them the love of God by helping out with the mess, and placing a Bible in their hands.  At each site, we all signed the inside cover of a Bible, presented it to the homeowner, and circled around and prayed for the homeowner when we arrived and when we left.  The people really appreciated the help and also appreciated the gift of the Bible.

We did five sites today.  The last site was the most severely hit, with a carpet of downed limbs and trees covering nearly the entire property.  We didn’t have enough time to finish this one and a a group will have to return at some point to finish it up.

This kind of work is very demanding, very physical work.  The limbs are large and many.  And 8 hours of this took its toll.  We were quite exhausted once the day was over.

Samaritan’s Purse has a lot of this stuff figured out.  Chaplains come out to each work site to talk with the homeowners.  They have every sort of tool imaginable.  They have a well-rehearsed safety policy.  They come into town with big trailers and portable offices and workshops. But one thing they don’t have figured out is restrooms for those at the job sites.  There are none.  We are twenty minutes away from the church home base, where there are large portable restrooms, but we can’t be driving back and forth all the time.  We stopped at a couple of gas stations between sites to use the restroom.  The first gas station was a run-down place with a barely functional bathroom.  Deb was one of the first to use it and had to figure out how to get the water to run properly.  The instructions were then passed down the line, hoping that the plumbing would hold up for the remainder of the group.  We managed, but for such a well-oiled machine, this one aspect is a glaring omission.

We took off as soon as we got back to the church, had dinner in a nearby parking lot, and drove for an hour, stopping at a Cracker Barrel in Corinth, Mississippi.