A real lifesaver

Wow it's not often someone introduces you as, "Oh yeah she's one of the people who saved my life." and they mean it in a literal sense. Of course, I'll explain; this summer before the infamous and devastating Hurricane Katrina made landfall, my good friend, Natalie, asked me to pray for a friend who was living in the area it was going to hit. She wasn't really sure where her friend was living; she had been in New Orleans at one time. Her friend was pregnant.

I write down and email out prayer requests for our lifegroup at church ( we're fancy; we have lifegroups, not Sunday school - ahem, same difference) Anyway, I asked the class to pray for this girl ( didn't even have her name, actually) and I emailed it out later that week and trusted that our friends prayed for her and her baby.

Fast forward to December 2005 - my little family drives over to the home of David and Natalie Phillips (expecting in Feb 2006!) for a surprise birthday bash for Natalie. We meet there their new neighbor who lives in their basement-apartment. Her name is Dawn and she is a recently divorced, very pregnant young woman. She has come from a number of bad situations which I will not go into great detail about, just that her ex-husband is a drug addict, she comes from a broken home, and she barely survived Hurricane Katrina this summer.

As we chat, we get to talking about the most wonderful thing of all, how we came about to know God and have a relationship with Him. She also starts to tell us her harrowing tale of living the summer with some relatives in an old house on the Mississippi coast, of the electricity and communications going out long before the news that Katrina was heading directly for them; they were blindsided, of water rising to the attic where she and her family (and a few strangers) held on for dear life, how the waters were swept back out, of hunger, darkness, dampness, hiking through waist-high mud with two tiny dogs in her back-pack and a baby in her belly, and finally a long trek in a car with her brother on a road to nowhere which landed them somewhere in Florida. Then she came back to Tennessee. Wow. to hear the actual story from her is really amazing, and as she was telling me, something in my heart just jumped. I realized, this was the no-name, pregnant friend that we prayed for. How can I explain the voice of God in my heart telling me my answered prayer was sitting across the living room from me? The tears welled up in my eyes and yelped, "It was you we prayed for! You were the missing friend of Natalie's! We prayed for you!" She just smiled and nodded and said ," Thank you!"

Fast forward again to today - I was sitting beside my new friend Dawn at Natalie's baby shower, holding the new love of Dawn's life - her name is Shea (Shay) and she is perfect and beautiful. Another woman walks over to say hello and asks how we know each other, and Dawn says, "She's one of the people who saved my life. I was down there in the middle of Hurricane Katrina, and they prayed and I lived." Wow. It just doesn't get any better than that.