A Stake in the Ground
While deployed as chaplains with the BGEA Rapid Response Team, Jody and Trisha met a wonderful, young couple (practically newlyweds) who were victims of Hurricane Michael.
She had invited Christ into her life, but she had not gone very far beyond that in her walk with the Lord. He had felt God’s presence as he suffered through a terrible childhood, but he had never surrendered to Christ. As a young adult, he found himself embroiled in a life of drugs, alcohol and poor choices. Through the tragedies they experienced together and separately, they were brought together and were married. They began to build a life together with a new-found purpose. They tried to put their pasts behind them and hoped for a new start.
They had been married for only two months when Hurricane Michael came and destroyed their family home just as it had thousands of others. As if there was not already enough tragedy in their lives, the storm heaped loss on the newly married couple. While their physical lives were spared, the life they were building together seemed to have been lost.
Three months after the hurricane, very little had changed. The storm seemed to have intensified their misery as the memories of their pasts brought regret and pain. Fear of the future and the uncertainties of rebuilding held them in chains of doubt and despair. Looking out from their camper each morning revealed the unchanged landscape of their destroyed home and debris strewn property.
Then, a glimmer of hope came when he landed a job at a nearby factory. Some optimism began to creep in, but there was still the destroyed home and littered properly that reminded them daily of the hurricane.
She was one of the first to request help from Samaritan’s Purse when the disaster relief headquarters had been established in Panama City. Yet it would be weeks before the team would arrive to start the demolition of their home. Her anxiety grew as the day approached for the Samaritan’s Purse team to come. The memories of life in that home were vivid and she felt like she was losing her home all over again.
The Samaritan’s Purse team arrived, along with Jody and Trisha, the chaplains from BGEA Rapid Response Team. Rather than simply tearing into the work, the team gently spoke with the overwhelmed man and wife and then began the process of recovering what they could safely remove from the home. The chaplains comforted the young couple and soon they both began to share their past, their fears about the future and the difficulties of facing tomorrow.
As the wife and Trisha stepped away to talk alone, the husband and Jody began a deeper conversation. The young man picked up a long stick and jokingly commented on how straight it was and that it would make a good spear. He then went on to say that he had acknowledged God and even prayed to God during his troubled past, yet he had never cried out to the Lord to come into his life or to forgive him. His prayers up to now were requests to deliver him from difficult circumstances.
As the conversation moved from things of the past to the possibilities of the future, Jody asked the young man to read along as they walked together through Steps to Peace with God. The young man read aloud along with Jody as they moved through each step. As the final step lead to the prayer, the young man read the prayer aloud and with wet eyes he acknowledged his sincerity in repentance and trust in Christ through faith.
Jody commented that no matter what had happened in the past, the young man could view today as a stake in the ground, representing a turning point in his life. At this, the young man took a step forward, raised the stick and forcefully plunged it into the wet ground at his feet and exclaimed, “Yes, just like this!” What a beautiful picture of a new birth and symbol of a new life with Christ, marking today as a turning point, a stake in the ground.