I was the camp pastor that summer—a natural fit because I knew the city and loved speaking to students. Whenever the seminary students caused me to doubt myself, it seemed as if God used the high school students to build me back up again.
As that summer began, I got involved in another prayer group. But this one was more ambitious. This one swung for the fences. Have you ever prayed for something so big that, if it happened, it could only be explained as divine intervention? Most of the time, if we’re honest, we’ll admit we lack the boldness. Maybe we’re afraid God will ignore us, and our faith will be damaged. Yet great movements in Christian history have always begun when someone stepped up and dared to pray for the impossible.
For example, as recently as two centuries ago, world missions was all but nonexistent. This I knew from the story of William Carey, who gave his name to my college. Basically, churches worried about their own people and ignored Jesus’ Great Commission, even though it was his final and greatest command.
Our marching orders are to make disciples of all nations. It’s remarkable that 1,800 years after the Resurrection, there were almost no mission projects for doing that.
But in 1806, five students gathered in a grove of trees in Massachusetts to talk about that very idea. Why wasn’t anyone trying to take the gospel to Asia or Africa? What could be done about that?
As they talked, the skies opened up and the rain began to pound on them. They took refuge under a haystack, strangely enough, and something about the whole experience, huddled together in prayer during the storm, got them fired up. Over time, those five students were all parts of pushing forward the world mission movement in fantastic ways.
One of them helped form the American Bible Society, translating the Bible into hundreds of other languages. Several of them formed a missions group that sent out 1,250 missionaries in its first fifty years. All of them had a vast impact on the world, and today a number of missions initiatives trace their beginnings back to those five students.
David Platt, Rob Wilton, and I wanted to reach New Orleans for Christ. Our prayer was to do something “out of the range” of our own capacity. We called our group “Out of Range for God,” and the idea was to pray for God to do a mighty work that was out of our range, but not his. We asked eighteen others, mostly students, to be part of disciplined daily prayer time. On a given day, eighteen of those would pray for three people who would pray and fast—the “tip of the spear” for our prayer pursuit. All twenty-one prayed, but three of us at a time would be on our faces, praying and fasting with all our heart and soul.
Thursday was my day, for example. I remember I was going to be preaching on Thursdays to close out the MissionLab camp week. At the culmination of a week in a city where dependence upon God was a necessity, I would extend an invitation for people to come forward and make professions of faith, or commitments to missions and ministry. I prepared eagerly, knowing that eighteen guys were interceding before God on my behalf. They cried out for the power of God to fall on that meeting.
I felt God’s presence that summer like never before, and I wasn’t the only one. My study and prep time was phenomenal; my energy and faith levels were off the charts. The invitation we offered was like a dam breaking, with students pouring down to the front of the room before I even invited them. It was a bit like the West Virginia ski retreat, but even more powerful, because this time it was the result of earnest, dedicated prayer, and many of these students were committing themselves to missions and ministry.
It was the most anointed time of my life, and I remember feeling overwhelmed with emotion. With hundreds of high school students sensing the presence of God, I’d have to go backstage at times to get control of myself and the tears that were flowing down my face. Many nights I sat behind the curtain and wept tears of joy that God was using me again. I knew I was caught up in something God was doing, and there’s no other feeling in life quite like that.
Our Out of Range prayer group was tapping into the heart of God for this city, and we began asking, “Does he want to do even more than this? Is what we’re seeing only the beginning?” We felt a burden for the city we were in and for seeing it come to Christ in an incredible way.
What we visualized was something culminating in a huge revival at the Superdome, home of the New Orleans Saints and often the Super Bowl. Again and again we returned to that image of people streaming into the Dome and having God show up in power. But the summer was now winding down, and it was time to begin preparing for the fall semester.
If we’d watched the news closely, we’d have learned that meteorologists were following the development of something called Tropical Storm 12, over the Bahamas, on the morning of August 24. It was hurricane season.
Two hours before making landfall in Florida the next morning, this tropical storm was upgraded to hurricane status. The name assigned to it was Katrina. After entering the Gulf, it moved from Category Three status to Category Five in only nine hours, and things got serious.
On August 29, it made landfall on the shores of Louisiana.
At the outset of those events, our prayer group capped off the summer by holding a retreat in Pass Christian, Mississippi, about an hour from New Orleans. Some of our wives gathered back in town at my home. We went to the retreat center to celebrate, continue praying together, and, as the Spirit led us, repent of sin and rededicate ourselves to God. It was a truly wonderful time, but that wasn’t surprising—serious prayer has the effect of bonding people together like nothing else.
I thought about the previous summer, when I’d been with Tim LaFleur in New Mexico. That had been a huge growth experience for me. This summer, praying with the guys had offered me another leap forward. I’d seen what God could do when his people took prayer seriously instead of simply giving it lip service.
This was a time of joy, of summing up our summer experience before moving into another school year. We had no idea how our lives were about to be disrupted.
As the storm continued to get worse, I remained convinced to ride it out. That’s what you do if you’re from the Gulf Coast—I was too Cajun to go back home, get Kandi, and evacuate. Some of the others felt the same way, and we decided to stay the course.
But Kandi overruled me. I checked in with her on the phone, and she said, “Come get me, Robby. I’ve got the TV on, and this thing looks serious. We need to evacuate.”
She’s always the voice of reason in my life, so I didn’t argue. I made the short drive back home. We packed our belongings in one suitcase, along with two to three days’ worth of clothing. Then we grabbed our dog Gracie and took off, leaving behind our other car, our wedding gifts, our pictures, and our videos. What we thought would be two to three days, however, lasted forever. There would be no home to come back to.
We figured Denham Springs, east of Baton Rouge, was a safe enough distance. Kandi’s family was there, and they took us in. Along with the rest of the world, we watched the reports in horror, with Katrina thrashing across the coast and then breaching the New Orleans hurricane surge protection in more than fifty places. The levees burst. Eventually, more than 1,800 people would lose their lives.
For someone like me who had lived so much of my life in that city, the images of the French Quarter were devastating. New Orleans had seemed ancient and somehow immortal; the places I’d known so well were now swept away in the floodwaters. People were on rooftops, praying for rescue. Thousands were in distress. The truth was laid bare: nothing on this earth lasts. Anything can be gone in an instant.
We saw those shots of the Superdome, swarming with evacuees, and I thought about all our prayers for a revival there. Really, God? This was the answer to our prayer? It was the exact opposite of everything we’d prayed about.
Denham Springs lost its power, but we continued to watch on an old four-inch, battery-operated TV set, found by my father-in-law. It was day three when I was finally able to t
alk to my parents. “Thank God you’re safe,” my mom said.
“You, too,” I said. “I’ve prayed for you guys. What have you heard about home?”
“We just found out we’ve lost everything.”
“What? Everything?”
“Ten to twelve feet of water to the roof in our home. It’s all destroyed. And Robby—your home, where you’ve been staying—there was an oil spill at the refinery.”
She was talking about Chalmette’s Murphy Oil facility, where the storm brought down a huge tank, and thousands of gallons of oil gushed into the water. Everything was contaminated, and we wouldn’t be allowed to go near our home for months. All that we’d left behind was gone forever. Along with my stuff being kept by my parents. Pictures of my whole childhood; collectables; old mementos; basketball videos; everything.
I felt worse for my dad. Dad’s whole family heritage was lost. Multiply these stories by the whole population of New Orleans and the vicinity. Small towns were destroyed. People disappeared and were never accounted for. You couldn’t feel too sorry for yourself, because someone you knew had it even worse.
A weather event had turned our world upside down. It was impossible not to wonder what God was doing, and whether he’d heard a single thing we’d prayed. These are the times when our faith is tested.
I thought about that interrupted retreat in Gulfport, in which we prayed, sang, celebrated, and drew closer together than ever, sure that God was doing something. We believe he’s always moving, that nothing happens for no reason. So what was this natural disaster all about?
It’s hard to say for certain. God works in ways we don’t always understand, and where he hasn’t clearly revealed his purposes, we shouldn’t claim to know them. Nonetheless, in a sense, this storm felt like a powerful, God-glorifying, but very unexpected answer to our prayer.
We’d asked him to move in a way so big it would be out of our range. And that’s just what he did. He scattered our group all over the world with that hurricane. Without it, as close as we’d grown, most of us probably would’ve stayed close by.
We had a burden for New Orleans. God had a burden for the world, and that’s exactly where this storm sent us.
Katrina forced us out of our range. God was saying, “Give up your small ambitions.” He moved in such a large way that not only was it out of our range, but we couldn’t even see it for a good while. Over the years I would chart the movements of my friends and see how God was using them everywhere, powerfully, exponentially—because of that storm.
We had envisioned a great, old-fashioned revival that would shake the city of New Orleans. We imagined people crying out in repentance at the Superdome. That had come to pass, in a way, but the Lord’s ear was tuned into the cries of people throughout the world. This was something I’d struggled with from the very beginning: We serve a “big picture” God. No matter how much we try to dream big, it’s never big enough to outdistance what God wants to do through us.
New Orleans would heal over time. Bourbon Street would hear the sound of jazz once again—not to mention our Saints would go on to win their first Super Bowl, an answered prayer for every native. God moved in more ways than one, of course. He mobilized believers across the world to respond in love and compassion. There were stories of people finding Christ in the midst of crisis. And then there was the Out of Range group; we were driven out of our range and into God’s.
In the book of Job, there’s a verse that says that God speaks from the whirlwind. We know that to be true. There’s another verse, however, that describes our situation even better. God says, “I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations that they had not known” (Zech. 7:14 esv).
That’s a verse about the terrible days when the people of Israel and Judah were scattered in defeat, but it holds an amazing truth: Scattering his people is one of God’s choice tactics for advancing the kingdom. He will do whatever it takes to get his people into “all the nations that they had not known.”
Christianity spread in the first century when the Romans drove Jewish believers out of their home country. Wherever they went, seeds of churches were scattered on new ground; then God sent Paul to water and tend the new fellowships.
Then there was the Haystack Prayer Meeting, another occasion when the skies opened up, a storm came, and God scattered young men across the world.
We figured all this out eventually, and we could only shake our heads.
I would never suggest that Katrina, with all its death and devastation, was all about us. I still grieve for the lives lost and the damage done. But I serve a Romans 8:28 God who uses all things for his glory, tragedies included. He speaks from the whirlwind, and he turns tragedy into triumph.
Chapter 19
Providence
In the wake of a raging storm, we sat in the darkened home of Kandi’s parents and checked in with our friends by phone—wondering when we’d be able to recharge these mobile phones; wondering if life would ever be normal again.
Rob Wilton, one of my closest friends, was with his parents in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He told us there was no power problem in the Carolinas, and there was plenty of room. “I talked to Dad,” he said. “He wants me to tell you and Kandi to pack your things and come live here in South Carolina.”
It seemed like a big step, even from our reduced circumstances. We were two Louisiana natives who were now homeless, and Spartanburg was more than six hundred miles away. But we prayed about it and decided this was what God wanted us to do. On our sixth day in Denham Springs, we repacked the suitcase, put gas in the car, and headed for the East Coast.
On the road there were buses and vans packed with shell-shocked people who had lost everything and now depended upon the kindness of strangers. They peered out the windows of their vehicles, their lives now reduced to open questions. Kandi and I prayed for them, asking God to move the hearts of his people in response.
The word in the Bible is diaspora—the dispersion of people outward, in every direction, due to crisis. The population of Louisiana decreased by 300,000 after the storm. Some of the people came back during the following months and years; many never did. They went to Texas or Georgia, Arkansas or Florida, and churches everywhere opened their doors to the displaced. People created new lives for themselves.
Our fellow seminary students, as well as the professors, were spread in every direction, too. But Dr. Kelley and the staff responded beautifully, moving many of the classes to the Internet and extension centers. Eighty-five percent of the students moved seamlessly to online classes or plugged in at a seminary extension center. Within weeks, churches were sending people to clean up the campus and prepare it for the following semester, and the Southern Baptist Convention made a huge, sacrificial donation to the seminary and to humanitarian aid for the city.
We all know there are people who love to condemn the church, saying it’s “full of hypocrites” and that kind of thing. There’s even more scorn for old-fashioned denominations such as the SBC. But I’ve seen how these crises become the church’s finest hour, again and again. And the cooperation of Baptist churches makes immense generosity available. God moves the hearts of his people, and they rise to the occasion, showing sacrificial love and compassion. Kandi and I were soon to experience this ourselves.
It was good to see Rob and Annabeth Wilton again. Rob is a Southern, African-American Cajun, by his own description—a unique guy. His mom and dad are from South Africa but came to New Orleans for seminary. Rob, his brother Greg, and his sister Shelley, were all born on the New Orleans Seminary campus. Then he spent his high school and college years in South Carolina, when his dad became the pastor of First Baptist Spartanburg.
Like me, he was a college basketball player. He and I worked with MissionLab and prayed together in the Out of Range group. God has extended his range since then through an opportunity to be an NFL chaplain for the Sain
ts, as well as preaching all over the world. Rob planted Vintage Church in New Orleans in 2008, bringing a new ray of hope to a city trying to rise again from the floodwaters. He was one of the few who went back.
One other thing—Rob’s dad, Don Wilton, was Billy Graham’s pastor for the last two decades of Dr. Graham’s life. In retirement, Dr. Graham joined Don’s church even though he lived more than an hour up the road near Asheville, North Carolina. He respected Rob’s dad that much, and looked to him for counsel and encouragement during his final hours.
When we arrived in Spartanburg, the Wiltons received us with open arms. I honestly don’t know what we’d have done otherwise, but this episode was clearly a key piece in God’s plan for us all along. It was his way of finally showing me the range of ministry he had set out for me.
Kandi and I settled in to a small trailer the church made available, and Dr. Wilton immediately let us know he was going to put us to work at First Baptist. I was all for that. He knew we needed to be busy, and in particular, busy with ministry. What we didn’t need was to brood over what we’d lost and why God had chosen such a perplexing way to respond to our prayers.
There was also an immediate question to address. Two months after Katrina, in October of that year, Rob and I had scheduled a mission trip to Indonesia with David Platt, my first overseas mission trip. I’d really looked forward to it—one of my first true mission experiences—but now I couldn’t imagine such a thing. I told Kandi, “I’m pretty sure I need to pull out of that trip. It just seems wrong to leave you here in Spartanburg, when we’ve both lost so much. We need to be together right now, don’t you think?”
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