September 2005

Dear ones,

Hurricane Katrina has taken many lives, and has disrupted and radically changed a great many more, including mine. I am back in the office in Marion, returned from the coast to heal, rest and reorganize before returning. This will be an emergency-type newsletter, brief and somewhat crude, in the interests of getting information to you.
We have posted a bulletin on the web site, and sent a brief notice by e-mail; however, since my computer in Ocean Springs was a victim of the hurricane, and we are working from only a fragmentary e-mail address book in the office, only a few will get the e-mail bulletin. And, of course, only those who have internet access can see the web site, and not all of those will know to look there. So, in order to reach everyone, we are publishing this special, extra issue. What follows next is the bulletin we posted on the web site (but not with all photos), plus the e-mail notice we sent out at the same time. Following those items we will include as much other information as the limited space in this extra edition will permit.

THE E-MAIL HURRICANE BULLETIN
Friends and family,
Our family members are all alive and unharmed; the properties are another matter.
Please check the web site where I have posted a bulletin report on the hurricane and our situation.
I am working from a fragmentary e-mail address book in the office, so please forward this to anyone that you think will be interested.
Thanks for caring,
Tom McKenney

THE HURRICANE BULLETIN ON THE WEB SITE
Dear friends,

Please forgive the silence from me. I have just returned from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, somewhat the worse for wear. The good news is that none of the family was injured or killed, thanks be to God!

I am somewhat injured from a very bad fall in the wreckage, but will heal. Both arms and hands are dinged, making typing very slow, but God is healing me as I write this (isn't that good to know?!? Is He good, or what?!?). Our house is gone; Jeff's is gone. My daughter Susan's house was flooded, and will probably be condemned and demolished. My daughter Melissa's home is badly damaged, but standing; it may be demolished. For those of you who know the Tanners in Pass Christian, their house is largely undamaged, but Ouida's art studio was flooded, and 12 bodies were found in a pool behind their house.

The devastation is indescribable-at least for me. I continue to be unable to express adequately how it is; the only words that focus in my weary brain are "catastrophic," "devastation," and "unreal." It is particularly unreal where our home was (it is as if it had never existed), for I couldn't find a point of reference that I could recognize; my brain would not accept that this was our home). Our house and Jeff's (my missionary son) were on a wooded peninsula in a coastal forest; the forest looks like a war was fought over it; what remains of it is tangled with wreckage from other people's houses and other flotsam from the sea.

The people on the Miss. coast have reacted wonderfully-98 percent of those I saw were being thoughtful with one another, trying to help one another, and survive. It is NOTHING like the situation in New Orleans, where black gangs and individual thugs raped and pillaged-and I do mean raped-in the Superdome, at gun and knife point, in front of the families. There has been ongoing WAR between them and the police and our troops.

We have had police, firemen and other emergency workers from all over the country. Police from Pensacola came by the other night just to ask if we were alright, and if we needed anything. They went somewhere and brought back ice. The National Guard, Seabees and soldiers have been great-hot and bored much of the time. Looting? Some, but at least one gang was caught in the act, and was from Jacksonville, Fla, having come over for that purpose. The curfew is strictly enforced, and that is good. The group I NEVER saw was the Red Cross, although they seem to be the group promoted on TV. The ones doing the heroic work in Mississippi were the Salvation Army and Baptist groups from Kentucky and Tennessee; there was also Operation Blessing (CBN). Individual church groups were everywhere. In short, the Red Cross seems to get the credit and the money, but it is the Christians doing the work. God bless them!

I will be going back in a day or two to help the children and see what else I can salvage in the woods. But let me tell you one story. The original stained glass piece, from which we made the "God Makes Beautiful Things out of Broken Pieces" prints, hung in my study window in Ocean Springs. When the house was torn away, it fell, about 15 feet, hung in a bush; then the stained glass piece itself fell out of the frame, another 6 or 8 feet to the ground. My granddaughter found it, under an 8-by-8 timber that probably weighs 400 pounds, COMPLETELY UNHARMED!

Again, please forgive the silence; until the last few days, even cell phones didn't work there, and our office hasn't been fully manned because my secretary's brother died in Indiana. And a special thanks to Bill Lee, our web master, who has been waiting in his office in Virginia for about six hours to get this from me and put it up on the web site.
Thanks for caring, and thanks for praying!
Tom

SOME ILLUSTRATIVE MOMENTS DURING THE CRISIS
Unforgettable for me is the way almost all the people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast rose to the occasion and, in the midst of tragedy, heartache and personal loss on an almost unimaginable scale, reached out to help one another. Also compelling is the way so many people, from so many other places, came to the coast to help. Electrical linemen, policemen, firefighters and emergency medical personnel came, from as far away as New York and California. One group of Baptists from Tennessee just arrived with chain saws and went up and down streets as soon as the streets were cleared enough to get through, knocking on doors and offering to cut up the downed trees on the houses and in the yards. Another Baptist group from Tennessee (or was it Kentucky?) set up in a parking lot and served two meals daily to all who would come to get them. A Methodist church from nearby Alabama came up to our van as we were preparing to return here, and filled our ice chest with ice (it held our remaining food); all we had in it was warm water.

While police, National Guardsmen and rescue helicopters were being fired on in New Orleans, the people I saw on the Mississippi Coast were thanking the repair crews, police and soldiers, and telling them to be careful (I remember five linemen from Georgia who were killed while helping us after Hurricane George); they appreciated and reciprocated the caring and appreciation. Oh, sure-there were isolated incidents of selfishness, in the form of someone trying to go to the head of a line, but they were the exceptions to the rule, and were immediately the object of generalized disapproval. One, who was extremely hostile and threatening, was taken down (violently and efficiently), handcuffed and taken away by soldiers. On reflection, I will estimate that more than 99 percent of all the people I observed were considerate of others and tried to help.

SNAPSHOT MEMORIES
Memories include the heat, the shattered wreckage of homes and businesses, streets and roads covered and impassable, the sodden smells of furniture, bedding, carpets and other things soaked in sea water, the smells of broken sewer lines and of death. Woven through all this setting were boats piled where boats should not be, cars and trucks wrecked, drowned and also in strange places, and stunned people, sorting through the wreckage as if in a bad dream.
Some specific vignettes:

1. The Coast Highway, buried under sand, wreckage and boats of all sizes, with the beach in some places expanded well inland.
2. An old man on 28th Street, about two miles from the beach, just standing among the mess in his yard, crying.
3. Finding my public school classmate, Mary Kalos Psikogios and her husband Pete, hot, tired, but alive and smiling in their Long Beach home where I had expected to find them dead.
4. Merchandise from the Long Beach K-Mart scattered as far north as the railroad levee; the building is no longer there.
5. Finding my dear Christian friend, Dick Lidgard in the wreckage of his Ocean Springs house which he had just finished rebuilding after it burned, his eyes pools of weariness and pain. He wanted to know how he could help me.
6. Getting a message, relayed to me from my granddaughter, Katie, in school at Ole Miss, saying, "Tell Granddaddy that God makes beautiful things out of broken pieces."
7. Carrying food, water and gasoline to friends and family members and seeing them immediately take some of it to share with others in need.
8. A broken water line, spouting water, on Canal Road, just south of Interstate 10, with an ad-hoc sign painted on a piece of plywood wreckage saying "DRINKING WATER," and people around it, filling buckets, cans and bottles.
9. Ad hoc signs made from wreckage plywood saying "YOU LOOT-WE SHOOT"; one said "LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT-DEAD."
10. Carefully measuring 2 1/2 gallons of precious gasoline into my van and praying that it would get me where I needed to go.
11. Two truckloads of young Negro men, from somewhere in the North, all wearing "Jesus Ministries" T-shirts, wanting to know what they could do to help.
12. A local radio station which abandoned commercial broadcasting to become a 24-hour clearing house for information; the people calling in and the broadcasters were wonderful. Some would call and say, "I have some extra water (food, gasoline, etc), if anyone can get here, I will give it away"; others would ask how to get various kinds of help, which shelters were open, etc. Some called, weeping, seeking information about loved ones still not found. All the callers were polite and grateful; most ended by saying "God bless you all." Among the memorable callers were these three:
a. An elderly woman called to say that she was at a certain parking lot passing out gospel tracts and she was out of tracts; she had no transportation, and wondered if there was anyone who could give her a ride to her church to get more tracts.
b. A man called to say that he had a live sea lion in the back of his pickup truck (deposited there by the tidal surge), and he wanted to know how he could get ice to keep it cool.
c. Another young man called to say that he had an alligator in his back yard and wanted to know "where I should take it." The radio people freaked and told him to stay away from it, but he said it wasn't very big, and he thought he should take it to an animal shelter.
These are indeed times that try men's souls, and the souls along the ravaged Mississippi Gulf Coast proved equal to the test, by the grace of God.
You are very precious, Romans 8:28 is still true, and, yes, God really does make beautiful things out of broken pieces.