Day 6 - On The Road

On the trip home, I got to ride shotgun in the van for part of the trip. It was after dark that I got to have a conversation with our group leader, John McGuire. He asked me how I had come to Christ, and how I had gotten involved in disaster relief for Servants Unite. I told John my story...

Both my brother and I were baptized on the same day in 1994, on the last night of Summit, youth rally that started in Columbus that year. As a 15-year old and as a new Christian in 1994, I was so full of energy. I thought I could go out there and change the world for God, but I had trouble even overcoming my own temptations and my own addictions. I struggled for years, and became so jaded that I could not see the damage that sin was doing to my life, my relationships, and even my belief in God.

Then came 9/11. My first motivation was to go and help, but I heard over the news how they no longer needed volunteers. Some people from Ohio had gone, but the need was over, and besides, Autumn Quarter classes at Ohio State University were about to start. I felt like I had missed a chance to do something.

Then came 8/29/05, a hurricane that nobody believed would hit New Orleans turned north and hit New Orleans. The news was full of the situation surrounding Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for weeks. Maybe I was listening on all the wrong channels, but I never heard about anybody going to help. Then some churches in Ohio gathered supplies and put them on trucks bound for Louisiana.

This is where John's story connects: he drove one of the trucks and thought up the idea of Servants Unite on the trip to deliver the supplies.

I heard rumors of Servants Unite a few weeks after that first truck load was sent. But the 2005 Ohio State Buckeyes football season had started. Where I work, football season and Christmas are the busiest times of the whole year, and it is almost impossible to spare a single employee until January.

Then my church's youth minister Adam Metz said that the youth group would try to go to Louisiana in the summer of 2006. I asked if there was an age limit and he said "no." I took my first trip with some of the teens from my church and some of the teens from another church.

That week transformed me. It is the reason why I went back for more trips to Louisiana, and it is the reason why you can see about it on this blog.

Anyway, John and I talked about a lot of other things, including how the American Dream has become materialistic, and how different all of our things look after we've seen a disaster zone. He played Switchfoot's latest CD for me, which includes their take on the American Dream.

We stopped in Tennessee, north of Nashville. There, in the church's gymnasium, we rolled out our sleeping bags and air mattresses, and spent the night. It was the same church we had stayed in on my first trip.