Hurricane Florence – The Nexus

In this final part of our series, Pursue: Chasing God in a Godless World, we talk about the one thing that has the greatest power to throw us off the path to life. Having this thing in our lives is like having mold in our houses. It can grow in ways we don’t notice or see until we’re sick from it. What is it and how do we deal with it? Keep reading to find out.

Resist Pride

We had a rainy November,didn’t we? As the rain was falling a couple of weeks ago, I looked out at our swamp and we had more water standing in our yard than we did during Hurricane Florence. And, given that we had almost as much rain over those few days as we did in the bigger storm, I shouldn’t have been surprised. It still wasn’t the catastrophic rain they had not all that far east of here. The real problem from that amount of flooding isn’t just the floodwaters themselves. It’s what comes next. The North Carolina Baptists have and will continue to have disaster relief crews busily at work for the next 2-3 years to get life restored to where it was before Florence rolled through. It’ll take that long because the clean-up is hard work. You’ve got to go into these homes and demo and replace everything from the ground up to above wherever the final water line was. And you have to do all of that because of the threat of mold.

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This past weekend, our community, like many others, was impacted by Hurricane Florence. By God’s grace we have not been devastated to the level others have experienced, but we couldn’t meet in person. Instead, I was able to take to Facebook Live and share a message with the community that way. Here’s what I shared as the storm raged around the region. Thanks for reading.

A Message for a Stormy Day

Well, good morning. For many of you, good rainy morning. My name is Jonathan Waits and I have the privilege of serving as the pastor of First Baptist Oakboro.

I don’t know about you, but it’s been rainy here the last couple of days. Actually, for a whole lot of folks in this region, “rainy” doesn’t begin to cover it. Florence has given us the kind of rain that would have given Noah some much-needed relief after building a boat for 100 years. We’ve had the kind of rain that will leave people’s land and lives devastated for a long time. It’s the most rain this nation has seen since Hurricane Harvey dumped part of the ocean on southeast Texas last year. Like that one, this terrible storm has already claimed a few lives. Those grieving families are in need of your prayers. And if you want to give toward the relief efforts that are already underway, consider one of the many faith groups with ready-made armies of volunteers who are knowledgeable and skilled in the various aspects of disaster relief—groups like Samaritan’s Purse and the Southern Baptist Convention (specifically, the Baptist State Conventions of North and South Carolina, and the Baptist General Association of Virginia). You can go directly to their websites and give or sign up to volunteer just as easily. Read the rest…