TBM: Texans on Mission volunteer Gary Monroe said survivors of Hurricane Idalia in Florida shared amazing stories. One woman was not too interested in getting a Bible as a gift from a TBM team.
After the volunteers had taken out some damaged trees in her backyard, Monroe said Art Brandenburg went to hand her a Bible.
“She said, ‘I got plenty of Bibles so I don't need that Bible.’” Monroe recalled. “Art says ‘no, this is a special Bible’, and he flipped it open and showed her the signatures from the team who had served her, and she fell apart.
“It was just something to see. It was a very moving moment. It was incredible.”
Monroe is a member of Bounds Baptist Church in Powderly, Texas
Adelina Lewis and her husband, Jim, served as part of the chainsaw ground team. The couple, members of Antioch Community Church in Dallas, are veteran TBM chainsaw team members.
Adelina Lewis agreed with Monroe: Many chainsaw stories become stories of faith shared.
At one home, she said, the team had followed their GPS to a rural home that had called for help. “As we drove in, we could start to see immediately there's a lot of damage to trees, a lot of big limbs, tops of the trees bent down, broken, lots of hangers. We call them widow-makers.”
Hangers are tree limbs severed from a tree by high winds but still dangling precariously above, held in place by splintered wood.
“The house was OK, but they had two young daughters,” Adelina Lewis explained. “They were very excited to see us because all these hangers and trees were over their playground equipment. The girls couldn't come out and play because it was so dangerous.”
The family “already had two teams come out and say, ‘We can't do it. We don't have the equipment for this type of work. It's too high for us,’” Adelina Lewis said. So the family’s dad “had kind of given up hope that we (TBM volunteers) were going to be able to help.”
To make matters worse, the father “was out of work at the time because he'd hurt his knee, so this was a family of great need,” she said.
Adelina Lewis said the TBM team shared with the young family “that we came all the way from Texas because God brought us here and God led us to come specifically to your house today.
“We never know in the morning where we're going. Art calls the phone numbers in the work orders and sees who answers and (tells these families), ‘God sent us here.’”