On Wednesday, we went to Staten Island. Aside from transporting sheet rock from house to house, we met with a man named Pastor Steve from the Movement Church and the Convoy of Hope Organization. He told us how a few weeks after Hurricane Sandy took place, all of the relief that was previously helping the citizens just left. Truly, prior to this trip, I thought that everything that had to do with the hurricane was over; that it wasn’t really that bad. I was proved wrong very quickly, the deeper that we went into neighborhoods and houses the more devastation we saw.
On Thursday, we went to Breezy Point to partner with The Legacy Center. I had never heard of that place in my life, the residents even acknowledged that it was not a well known area prior to the storm. There was so much debris and and just piles and piles of sand everywhere. We later found out that it was actually a sandbar where people decided to build really nice houses; 60% of which were absolutely destroyed. A man named Gerod told us that he had to rebuild his entire first floor because when he stepped out of his door, he saw six foot waves and knew how badly the storm was going to end. He also brought it to our attention that FEMA was not very willing to give more than a few thousand dollars to each house, when they individually accumulated at least thirty thousand dollars in damage apiece. I wasn’t super surprised, but I thought that people would at least have had a little more to sustain them.
On Saturday we went back to Staten Island, to a different set of houses and met this lovely woman. We repainted her living room, primed her kitchen, her hallway, and did outdoor cleaning. It turned out beautifully, but what was even more beautiful was the look on her face when we said we were finished. She said that she had not seen wood framing on her windows in five months. It's crazy how much I take for granted. Physically, I worked hard this week, but that was nothing compared to the hard work that God was doing for me spiritually. I really thought that I was giving back to other people, but it seemed like God was giving everything to me. Many of the residents of the places we visited spoke so highly into my life and were really ministering more to me than I was to them!
Ultimately, I feel like God does everything for a reason, even reasons that we may not understand. New York is such a large area and its composed of people from all different backgrounds and walks of life. I sort of had the harebrained idea that maybe out of disaster, hope and joy could arise. Maybe this would be the thing that would bring people together and bring people to better know the love of God. Peoples' stories and how they responded to all of the help that was still being offered to them, even five months after the storm, was just amazing. People were so thankful and grateful that anyone still cared. I felt like that was just God. He took us to a place that no other help bothered staying. The best part of everything, was the looks and the joy on peoples faces'. Never once did we bombard them with the love of God, they knew that we were with Christian organizations, but they just thought that we were serving them out of the kindness of our hearts. Often, they brought up God first, and how good He is and how he saved them; even through the storm and the trauma, their faith in God never wavered. Only God can take something as simple as painting a living room and turn it into ministering into a disheveled life.
I would love to continue going on missions' trips, inside the United States and outside of it. I love serving people through God. But I also realized, people are right in our city, yearning for a deeper connection with God. As I continue to develop the skills that I learned on this trip, I certainly plan to just continue sewing seeds in people's lives and just helping where I can.
- Ivana Marshall
