On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina moved ashore, devastating the Gulf Coast of the United States from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama. The scale of the damage is impossible to describe. Katrina still remains the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, but the property damage pales in comparison to the impact the storm made on the lives of all of us who endured its wrath.
For more stories at your doorstep, subscribe to The Baptist Paper.
SIGN UP for our weekly Highlights emails.
As president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, I helplessly watched the levees break, filling my city and campus with overwhelming floods. Even now, the memories, emotions and trauma of those days can come boiling out at the most unexpected times, filling my eyes with tears and my heart with memories so real it is like being there again.
On this 20th anniversary of the great storm, I am going to answer a question I have never been asked. If I were limited to just one word to describe my Katrina experience, what would that word be?
One word
This may surprise you, but the one word to describe my Katrina experience would be gratitude.
As I sifted through all of my memories and experiences of those days and the years that followed, I find that a profound sense of gratitude overwhelms everything else that lingers in my soul.
I am deeply grateful for all that God did prior to Katrina to prepare our seminary to survive its impact. Of course, we had no idea that is what God was doing, but in the rearview mirror, it is astounding.
For years we had a trailer park on campus, dearly loved by students who lived there. Individual students owned the trailers and would sell them to incoming students when they graduated. You can imagine their age and condition, but the students cherished those trailers and called them the “Beverly Hills” of campus.
We had a desperate need for more student housing on campus, and architects insisted we replace the trailer park with multi-family housing to have a place for everyone on campus. This was a highly unpopular, controversial decision, but we made the call to move ahead and close the trailer park well before the storm.
Katrina’s floodwaters were very deep in that area of the campus. All of those trailers would have been destroyed and floating around doing untold other damage. Instead when Katrina hit, that area was a construction site with little damage done in spite of the flood.
God’s provision
That is only one example. Unusual circumstances forced us to replace our health insurance plan, based in a local New Orleans hospital, with a national health plan not long before Katrina hit. Our employees were scattered to more than 30 states for an extended period of time but were able to easily access their benefits because of the unexpected change to our health insurance.
Also, from the day I became president, we emphasized the revolutionary change we believed was coming to the world of higher education and the resulting need to develop nontraditional strategies to teach students anywhere in the world.
Katrina scattered our students and faculty and took away our classrooms, library and offices. The only way we could continue to teach was to use the kind of strategies we had been discussing for years.
Without the courage and grit of faculty, staff and students, Katrina would have been the end of NOBTS. But without our knowledge or understanding, God prepared us for our Katrina experience. When the storm unleashed its fury, we were ready. What a mighty God we serve!
I also am overwhelmed with gratitude as I remember what Southern Baptists did for us.
When the Florida Baptist Convention heard the faculty would be gathering in Fort Worth after the storm, they delivered money and Walmart gift cards to every faculty family who gathered. A Sunday School class at FBC Euless, Texas, went shopping for everything they thought families would need. Everywhere our seminary family was scattered, Southern Baptists helped them find shelter for as long as it was needed.
When we set up our temporary administrative center in Atlanta, the Georgia Baptist Convention provided housing for every administrator, faculty and staff member who would be working there. Chick-Fil-A brought breakfast every morning for a month to our center.
Southern Baptist Disaster Relief units began rolling into the strike zone as soon as the winds died down, and they stayed for months, rotating people in and out to help deal with the enormity of the damage.
Other SBC entities reduced their Cooperative Program allocations so that more CP could go to NOBTS. The other five seminaries reduced their CP for three years to help our school get back on its feet.
GuideStone covered the entire cost of our health plan for three months to take that concern off the table. All over the nation, Southern Baptists made things harder for themselves in order to help our seminary family and others affected by this catastrophic event.
National project
My debt of gratitude extends beyond Southern Baptists to the whole nation. In many ways, helping people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast became a national project.
Yes, I have more stories than anyone wants to hear. But one word summarizes all my stories — gratitude. Whatever experiences God’s children face, whether pleasant or catastrophic, believers should realize that the Lord was neither surprised, nor unprepared nor nervous over what unfolded.
As Paul reminds us: For God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28). Blessed be the name of the Lord!
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Chuck Kelley, President emeritus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
