Early in July, I received an invitation from Lorie Grogg to join her on a prayer walk in New Orleans. Team Expansion’s partner, Crossroads Mission, has been working in New Orleans East for almost one year now, following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Matt Woodward, who is the Team Expansion/Crossroads team leader in this project, is a member of Phoenix, Arizona’s Christ’s Church in the Valley where Lorie is a prayer warrior in the congregation’s missions ministry. Lorie envisioned prayer walking the areas where Matt and his team are hard at work to re-establish homes and plant the Church in the midst of miles and miles of devastation.

Lorie, Marcy Johnson (another Arizonian), and I met up at the baggage claim in New Orleans in the late afternoon of August 4. Abbey Flaherty, a Crossroads worker, graciously transported us to the mission “headquarters”. Faith Community Church has allowed Crossroads and Building Better Communities (an organization formed by Journey Christian Church) to use their building as an office, an “apartment complex” for workers, housing for volunteers (more than 4,000 volunteers have passed through this center this year), and a warehouse/distribution center. Electricity for this building (one year after Hurricane Katrina, mind you) is still supplied by generator only. Approximately 171,000 homes were destroyed and over 300,000 people were affected by the hurricane’s devastation. As we drove into the affected areas, Lorie, Marcy, and I were overwhelmed by an eerie, oppressive feeling. Traffic lights did not work. Gas stations were closed. Homes were deserted. Businesses were not operating. No grocery stores. No restaurants. Only devastation. It was like being in a ghost town on a western movie set

We arrived just in time to settle into our “dorm” room which was already occupied by a middle school volunteer group from Ohio and Sophia, an adventurous 17-year old girl who had journeyed alone from Seattle to give two weeks of her summer to make a difference in New Orleans. We enjoyed the evening meal with volunteers, interns, staff, and a few home-owners. Volunteers then headed off to their rooms to pack up for their trips home the following day. Lorie, Marcy, and I rested up for the next day’s prayer walk,

Early Saturday morning, we hurried out to the shower stalls which were housed in small trailers outside of the church building – five shower stalls for men and five shower stalls for women – in separate trailers, of course. After breakfast, Matt loaned us a Crossroads vehicle and led us to Chalmette, the area in which the volunteer teams would be working the following week. Before leaving us, he showed us a very interesting sight – a shrimp boat (we were miles and miles from any body of water where a shrimp boat would normally be found) now seemingly “dry-docked” in someone’s front yard. No one has had the means or resources to get it back to water.

In most of Chalmette, the water level during the flooding following the hurricane had reached to the attics of the houses. Some houses were totally destroyed. Others, especially those made of brick, looked fairly unharmed on the outside. The insides of all houses, however, were a different story. The flood waters had brought in mud, mud, and more mud. Mold and mildew had taken over. Many homeowners did not have flood insurance. Thousands of people had left New Orleans to build new lives in other states. Three hundred homes in this area were marked for demolition by August 31 unless someone began restoring them. The Crossroads team and volunteers were taking the first step in restoration by removing the mud, furnishings, and drywall from the homes.

Lorie, Marcy, and I had come for a different reason. Our purpose was to pray Life back into this area. That morning and early afternoon, we walked six streets from end to end in Chalmette. As we walked, we prayed for those whose lives had been affected by loss of relatives, loss of homes, loss of businesses, loss of hope. Matt had given us 17 addresses for which to pray specifically. At these 17 addresses, we prayed for the Crossroads volunteers and the work of restoration that would be done by them in those homes the following week. We prayed for the homeowners that might be working alongside the Crossroads teams. We prayed that they would know the Way and the Truth and the Life.

A new group of volunteers arrived on Sunday to begin work on the houses along the streets where we had prayed. Before the work teams went out on Monday morning, Matt challenged them to complete a humanly impossible task – gut out seventeen houses by Friday night. Only God could give them the strength to do that.

The following Friday night, Lorie called Matt. He answered the phone, “Eighteen!”

God can do immeasurably more than we could ever ask or imagine!