Most, perhaps all, of our team wrestled with the newness of this place and the arrival questions for which we had no answers: How does the cooking schedule work?  What will be our jobs?  What do we do next?  In this neighborhood of near total disorder, we began to familiarize our small piece of reality by finding a place to call "our bed".  Little did we know how one day would restore the disorder to our lives.

I was part of the cook/clean-up team of two.  After the other teams departed for their morning's work we cleaned the bathrooms, emptied the trash and mopped floors.  After setting out food for lunch we began to plan a spaghetti supper for some 35 people - no small feat from a small kitchen.  We found a grocery further inland and replenished our supplies.  We took some pictures of the chaos "out there" as we returned to our familiar station.

Just when it seemed that we had everything under control, my cooking partner realized that she had to cook the pies for supper - something that had escaped our planning.  Also, we fretted over how to have all the elements of the supper ready at the same time.  It seemed that we had too few pots and utensils, and too many items to prepare.

The unexpected joy of the day was the reaction of the hot and tired workers who, upon returning, all were elated at the sight of the freshly baked pies cooling in the kitchen.  Their appears to be the joy of the often hungry and the rarely blessed.

And then our surprises for the day began: a team of ten would be arriving for supper and a second team of ten would likely arrive by night's end.  We purchased some additional spaghetti sauce and estimated that we likely had sufficient amounts of food for the workers and the arriving volunteers.

Two couples, one each from the arriving teams, had joined us mid-afternoon and were pleased to help us prepare our meal.  Given the additional people we expected for supper, we would no longer fit in the area to which we had grown accustomed for meals.  Also, we needed a larger serving line.  With both new teams delayed, we ate our supper among those with whom we had been eating for the past two days.

While some were still eating one of the team member form the East Liberty Presbyterian Church received a call with the stunning news of his 39-year-old son's death.  We were saddened for him and felt unsure of what, if any, help from us would be helpful to him.  In a short time, we discussed the possibility of gathering for prayer later in the evening.  Given the calls that our grieving brother needed to make, it was unclear at what time we would gather and whether he would want to be present.

At that very moment, one of the new teams arrived with the excitement and anxiety that we had felt only two days earlier.  Suddenly, the disorder had returned to us; our sense of reliable predictability tottered and then toppled.  The cooking and cleaning schedule so earnestly prepared by our three team leaders would no longer work.  Sleeping arrangements were up in the air.  And what had seemed increasingly manageable had become unpredictable.

We who had come as the compassionate Christians from our stable homes and ordered lives suddenly felt more like those homeowners whose property had been damaged by Katrina.  We had come to share their burdens but we never expected that we would share and experience some of the chaos of their lives.

Like the complexities of human life that Jesus experienced in coming to our humanity, we were no longer polite help; we were sharing their life and feeling some small part of the trauma Katrina had brought.

As I write, one person walks towards me.  "Can't sleep?" I asked.  "Snoring" she said, "I can't sleep for the snoring and with the new teams, there seems to be no place else to go."  When a person can't sleep, that's serious disorder in their life.

One of the lessons for me today is that it is much easier to recite "we walk by faith and not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7) and much harder to live it when sight travel does not work.  Some time from now Katrina survivors will tell how the removal of the familiar taught them again to walk by faith.  This is not to romanticize their current plight, but acknowledge that when sight no longer reveals what has been unquestioningly familiar, it is faith that does become predictable: trusting God, seeking God's way, trusting God's power, abandoning oneself into what may appear as chaos save for the order of our loving God.

Steve