After Hurricane Helene, helping Hephzibah recover
The recovery efforts in this Georgia town remind me a bit about finding purpose through service in tragedy.
On Saturday I spent several hours in Hephzibah, Georgia, trying to help people affected by Hurricane Helene get a few steps closer to returning to normal.
In this rural community near Augusta, countless trees uprooted and toppled when the hurricane passed through. Some of those trees crushed homes, cars or powerlines, while others missed homes by inches. Many people are without power or running water. Across Georgia, more than two dozen people died, and more than 3,000 trees had to be removed and 7,000 utility poles replanted to restore power to more than 1 million people.1
So a week after the storm, I donned a yellow “Helping Hands” T-shirt and traveled to Georgia with about 10 others to help with recovery efforts. We chopped fallen trees and carried debris to roadsides. We cleared driveways. We dismantled a sheet-metal carport that Helene had twisted and turned upside down.
We also did a fair amount of cutting up—cracking jokes about trees, chainsaws and the rugged power of a Toyota Prius.
Even in this community that didn’t suffer the catastrophic flooding of North Carolina’s mountains, it’s surreal to see the damage and disruption caused by fallen trees. A tree can weigh several tons, something we never appreciate until a tree falls and disrupts our life, sitting immovable until someone with the necessary equipment and skills can help.2
Acts of service
When we started down the dirt driveway to one home we were asked to visit, we saw that we would have to pass under a giant tree that stretched over the driveway and leaned into a sagging power line, as though they had done a trust fall and decided to hold that pose for more than a week. A couple of us jumped out of the truck to see whether the tree was high enough for us to drive underneath.
When I walked under the tree, I hunched my head lower and held my breath, unsure how long the power line could hold.
The woman who lived there was on her way out. “I’m going to feed the National Guard,” she said. She showed us what she needed us to do. She mentioned that her house was still without power, and the water lines beneath her house had busted in the storm—yet she offered us her case of bottled water.
Meanwhile, we noticed someone walking up her 500-foot driveway with a ladder over his shoulder. It was one of her neighbors coming to nail a tarp over a hole in her roof.
At another house we visited, the homeowner arrived home soon after we finished removing a giant tree from his driveway. Using another exit from his property, he had just driven to a store had ice, which he bought and delivered to a CVS nearby. He said he instructed the CVS employees to give the ice away to anyone who needed it on that hot autumn day. He also did not have running water, but he offered us water as well as MREs from his stockpile.
If we’d had time to visit dozens of homes, I think I would have dozens of examples like this to share: People watching out for their neighbors and the visitors who had driven 100 miles or more to help them.
They reminded me of an experience recorded by Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist who endured life in a Nazi concentration camp, a challenge far more severe than downed trees and lack of electricity.
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread,” he wrote in his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning. “They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” 3
According to Frankl, we create meaning in life by making choices, including or especially those choices we make in response to suffering. When we choose to give—to prepare food for the National Guard, to carry ladders down long driveways to tarp a neighbor’s roof, to drive to get ice so our neighbors can have a way to cool down—we create meaning in our communal struggle. That’s why it comes naturally to so many of us to reach out and help others.
The meaning of Hephzibah
The name of the town Hephzibah ignited my curiosity about place names, so I searched for it on my phone while riding in a friend’s truck between work assignments. I saw that Hephzibah means “the Lord’s delight.”
It appears in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, in a section talking about the restoration of what seemed lost:
“They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated … You will be called Hephzibah … for the Lord will take delight in you.”
When disaster of any kind strikes, countless acts of service can help us to rebuild and renew, and to create something that we can delight in. That’s what I saw amid hundreds of fallen trees in Hephzibah. It’s what others have seen as people in the mountains of North Carolian sacrifice for their neighbors as they start to recover from the devastating storm. It’s what we see whenever we choose helping others in response to tragedy.
About two weeks after my son was born in 2012, a mighty windstorm called a derecho ripped through Lynchburg, Virginia, where we lived at the time. We were without power for more than a week as a giant tree sat on the powerlines about a mile away. Eventually I learned that the reason that tree was saved for last was because of a massive hornet nest discovered in its branches.
About a year later, I thought about riding my bike to work but decided to drive instead. While I was at work, another derecho came through and a giant oak tree across the street toppled over and landed right where my car would have been parked if I had biked to work. Whew, close call!