The following is a guest post from my wife, Jenny:

I was about to be a missionary.

As I was preparing to go to New Orleans for the summer I was scared out of my mind.  I just sat in my room and cried because I was so uncertain of the changes that were coming in almost all areas of my life.  But I knew I had to do this since I had such a strong urge to spend my summer living like a missionary.

The church I lived in was in a suburb of New Orleans that received the worst damage from Hurricane Katrina. I went 3 years after the hurricane and my expectations were that most things would have been cleaned up by then, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The downtown part of the city was wealthy enough to rebuild and fix immediately, but the area where I stayed 20 minutes outside the city was a different world entirely. About one third of the homes were in the middle of an extremely slow reconstructive process that was dependent on depleting one’s savings and waiting for a volunteer plumber or electrician to come to town on mission, which rarely happened. The remaining two thirds of the homes I saw were abandoned or leveled down to the slab. Most of these homes had messages spray painted on their sides regarding damages or how many dead were found inside. Many of the families choosi Continue reading →