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Bigger than Them
By Jennifer Raynes (Class of 2006)
Photos provided by Outreach Ministries
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If today's generation of college students really are as self-focused as many accuse them of being, ORU students stand in stark contrast to the stereotype. Then again, maybe they've found a remedy for a selfish nature. Sacrifice and service seemed to be the cure for a group of 155 ORU students and staff who traveled to New Orleans over fall break.
Fifteen months after Hurricane Katrina, most relief organizations have long since packed up and left New Orleans, while many families remain in FEMA trailers next to their hurricane-ravaged homes, with little hope for the future. Little did these residents know, however, that on Oct. 13, a group from ORU was embarking on a 17-hour bus ride in order to work with Service International to help rebuild homes in the city. They did it last year in Long Beach, Mississippi, and they did it again in New Orleans--with selflessness as the key to their success.
Wake-Up Call
Community Outreach program coordinator Scott Davis (Class of 2005) says that these practical ministry trips provide students with the ideal opportunity for spiritual development and serving other people. "When you offer students a chance to participate in something bigger than they are," Davis asserts, "a lot of times it really gets their attention."
As far as getting their attention, it certainly worked. Upon arrival, students got a taste of just how big of a project they had taken on when they saw how bad the destruction was. "I've never seen anything like that," freshman Jennifer Nold, who hails from Missouri, said. "The whole city was wiped out." But the shock didn't end there. "Eerie" was the word that Nold said best described the feel when she walked into the first house: "The dining room table was still set for supper. There were pots still on the stove." For Nold, being in the house was a wake-up call that made her realize "people live in this every day...and it's been like this for a year."
Anything but intimidated by the task, students set right to work, cleaning and stripping the houses down to their frames. "Gutting" is what the job was called, and as junior Josh Bibeau of Michigan explained, that meant "pretty much [tearing] everything out from start to finish, including every single nail, so that all that's left are the two-by-fours that separate the walls." Individual tasks ranged from moving furniture out to the curb, to power washing the walls, to tearing out the floor tiles.
Sweating out eight hours of intense labor every day, team members found themselves working in 100-degree heat, wearing full-body suits and face masks to protect themselves from mold. Junior Phil Lundrigan of Kentucky remembers all too well the intense workload ("I don't think I've done ministry that was that strenuous physically")...and the cockroaches. "It was a nasty place," Lundrigan said, "but it's the same way in life...people have nasty things in their life, but that's what we're called to help them get out of...."
Power of Prayer
Redemption was an emerging theme of the trip, not only with the physical rebuilding of ravaged homes, but with team members ministering to the spiritual needs of New Orleans residents as well. In preparation for the trip, Outreach Ministries directors encouraged students to focus on the true reason why they were there, which was to take every opportunity possible to be bold and share the love of Christ. Or, in the words of Jennifer Nold, "Not being so caught up in the project that you forget the people."
People were indeed the priority. Scott Davis recalled one homeowner who said that she had been praying desperately for her house to be fixed and "it was literally the next day or the next couple of days that the Service International truck pulled up" with a group of students ready to rebuild her home. "She was literally in tears," Davis said, "she was just so full of gratefulness." Nold remembered another man who could barely speak because he was so emotional upon seeing what the ORU team had done to fix his family's house. "Having seen him like that," she said, "that was enough to cause me to continue to work as hard as I [could]" on each and every house.
It seemed that the one testimony several students couldn't wait to share, however, wasn't even from a New Orleans resident; it was from someone sitting right in their own bus. Yes--even the bus driver got saved. "One student would sit with him every day at breakfast," Nold recalled. "He got outside of himself and sat with [the bus driver] instead of with his friends" in order to share with him about God. On their fourth day in New Orleans, the bus driver stood up during the students' daily testimony time and shared how he had accepted Christ that morning. In the words of senior Drew McDaniel, who comes from Kansas, "there were eternal differences made" as a result of the relationships built on that trip.
When the team arrived back in Tulsa, there was immediate buzz around campus about the lives that were changed and the souls that were won. But now, nearly two months later, many students have discovered a change they didn't expect: a change within themselves. Abandoning their selfishness, there was a marked difference in the attitudes and spiritual lives of those who went, according to Josh Bibeau: "[We] think, 'A week really can't change a life,' but at the end of the trip, a week really did change students' lives on my team." Such a mission, Bibeau believes, has the ability to transform even the most self-focused person. That's why, he says, "it's worth it to invest in people no matter who they are, [because] every man is redeemable. Everyone can change."
