Pastoral Letter
by Phillip
Reynolds
As you see on the front page, we will celebrate the completion of the renovation of our sanctuary with a Consecration service on May 18. This was made possible by generous gifts by many people in our church, a wonderful estate gift, and funds from another unlikely source: Hurricane Katrina.
Katrina did $35,000+ worth of damages to our building. This included some water damage to the interior of our sanctuary. Our insurance company determined that the sanctuary ceiling needed to be repainted and the beams cleaned and restained. There was some minor damage to the carpet and additional water damage in the vestibule.
Our Buildings and Grounds Committee, chaired at that time by John Barber, wisely decided not to “patch-up” the damaged areas. Instead they voted to seize the opportunity and use the insurance money, along with the estate gift already on hand, to jump start a more extensive upgrading of the entire room. And this is what we eventually did. We pooled the estate gift, the insurance money, and gifts by others to wonderfully beautify our worship space at no additional debt to the church.
I remind us of this to make a point:
Katrina helped us! Can you believe it? Remember how we felt right after that
storm? Remember the things we all said? “This is the worst natural disaster in
Well, leave it to God to bring good things out of bad things. What happened here, when Katrina’s damage helped us transform our sanctuary into a thing of beauty, is just one small example of all the amazing blessings God brought out of that terrible storm. This shows us the power of God. God is so powerful that any crisis, no matter how large or how painful, can be turned into an even larger blessing. I am sure there are thousands of such stories all along the Gulf coast just like this.
Let’s remember this lesson and apply it to our own lives when we face individual hardships. The “Katrina times” of our lives are not over and done with, to be sure. More difficulty lies ahead. But we can look back on this storm, when nature delivered her most devastating blow to our area, and see how God redeemed our plight and blessed us.
We will celebrate on May 18. In the Consecration service we will thank the Lord, those who made gifts, and those who guided the project. And one of the most unlikely “thank– yous” will go to a mean old lady named Katrina.
Phillip