John Fischer The Catch

This morning I’m thinking about those people who lost everything in Texas, Florida, California, Oregon or Mexico, but the news cameras have moved on to some new disaster somewhere else in the world. For many of us who watched, it’s already forgotten. A couple days ago, we were riveted to our TVs. We could hardly carry on normal life because the round-the-clock coverage kept pulling at our emotions. We felt with the people; we heard their stories; we wondered what would happen to them. Everywhere we turned there were interviews, maps of the approaching hurricane, charts about earlier storms in history, and predictions about how bad this one was going be. And when the storm finally hit, there were news reporters only a few streets apart telling us what the storm looked like from their vantage point.

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Yesterday there was an article in the Los Angeles Times about church last Sunday at the First United Methodist Church in Dickinson, Texas. The week before Pastor Jack Matkin had canceled Sunday services due to the growing floodwaters. When the sun finally came out there was two feet of water inside the church building that was only six years old. All week long volunteers from Dickinson and all over Texas went to work pumping out the water and removing everything that was wet. By Saturday night the building was mostly dry with piles of pews, files and debris stacked outside, but a homemade sign was hung there, “WORSHIP SUNDAY AT 11.”

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