It was much harder to get started the second day than it was the first. It had nothing to do with our activities the night before; one beer and one cigar isn't that hard to recover from. It's just so hard to get motivated to do something, even something good, when you know it's going to be physically demanding and very messy. What's worse, we still haven't figured out exactly what Cornelia plans to do with the house. If the house is, let's say, going to be torn down, then what's the point of clearing it out first? It wasn't until later that the point became so clear.
We worked all morning by ourselves. Cornelia honked as she drove by on her way to church, but otherwise we didn't see her. We ate lunch around 11:30, and she still hadn't arrived. We called around 1:00 to say we needed to leave soon, but she didn't answer. As we were on our way back to the center, she called to say that she had brought us lunch. We weren't hungry, but we just couldn't turn her down.
When we arrived one of her many good friends was there and immediately offered us a cold beer. There's a premium on cold drinks in New Orleans these days, and I enjoyed my cheap, bad, cold beer. As we ate our lunch (which was left over from a party celebrating 30 years of service for their priest) the point of our whole trip became so clear. It had nothing to do with rebuilding a city. It had nothing to do with cleaning out her house. We made this trip and endured the shit so that a 78 year old widow would know that some strangers three states away loved her enough to endure two days of sweltering heat in miserable conditions. Yes, I hope that she either decided to move back into her house (although I don't think she can bear it), or I hope she gets some money from selling it. But more importantly, I hope that some word of our trip spreads so the reputation of those of us who claim Christ will be improved. God knows that our sins are many and our reputation stinks worse than a refrigerator full of food which has been unplugged for 9 months, and we could use some good press.
We headed home after we finished up on Sunday. We weren't supposed to leave until Monday morning, but there really wasn't anything left to see or do, and we were ready to get back to our families. I'm very glad we went, and my friends are going to be tired of hearing my Katrina stories. That's fine - they can easily shut me up by having some of their own!
