Michael Steinsland (Mayfair Community Church/North Park University) – As many people know there were many neighborhoods around the Chicago-land-area that flooded this past week, ruining homes and forcing entire neighborhoods to be evacuated. The waters rose to 25 feet in some places, in some places less. In
What I witnessed was an absolutely beautiful image of God working in the community. I saw his power to command the weather, to overtake and push people farther than they knew they could be pushed. Teens from the Corps were working side by side with city officials and residents of the neighborhood, and as houses flooded they yelled to those who were watching, pleading for help. Christ surely was with us, teaching us how we can be used. When something like a flood happens, we should all eagerly run to help, and I would argue that any decent human being should do the same. However, the dwindling state of humanity has lesser ideas on this, and so only teens and residents stayed behind to work hand in hand to fulfill a basic need: safety. We worked until we were asked to leave, and by this we were tested. It would have been easy to walk away at any point and feel good, deciding that we gave it our all. The truth is that with God, our all was not completed until the residents said so. So we continued building anyway, extending our strength to those who needed it.
The people we helped are no longer strangers who live across the street from our Corps and DHQ. We know their faces, we know their voices, and they know us. What I witnessed that day was a fragmented and broken community of strangers who were thrust into a position were they had to come together to achieve a goal. The beauty of God’s love was shown to me through two sisters who took charge of the operations after the city gave up. We were told to leave because there was nothing else we could do. Bystanders were coming to us, asking if they could help. We had the manpower and the equipment we needed, and yet we were told there was nothing we could do! It may have been true, that after wading in the water for so long, heaving sand bags over my shoulders and traversing through a current that left me breathless, that I could do no more. However, God could still do more through me, and through the others who stayed.
When the street lights went on and the sun retreated past the horizon, the bus dropped off its passengers right by our sand pile. When we were tired and sore, God delivered help! At first the passengers just stood around trying to find a way home, and then something clicked and they started filling garbage bags with sand and carrying them to the edge of the water so that we wouldn’t have to travel nearly as far to get them. All of a sudden we were trying to keep up with the sandbags that arrived to build our wall.
The arrival of the extra help was, I would argue, a miracle. I know that everyone was exhausted and tired of being outside waste-deep in the water, and to have someone cut our work in half was amazing.
When we all started to work together the things we did were blessed and we didn’t need to waste our energies. The community worked together and communicated so well that things started to run really smoothly. I actually had a really great time being in the water talking and hanging out with my new friends and our Corps members that I started to feel bad that peoples’ houses had been flooded while I was outside laughing and having fun while I worked. It was a really great experience that I feel blessed to have been a part of.
This is the type of community that God has called us to be in, amongst non-believers. So despite the damage and anxiety, I know that God has blessed that community with the knowledge that by their unity the worst may have been prolonged.