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We had another lady who suffered a stroke years before and is somewhat disabled. She's a prayer warrior in our church. Every hurricane she just wants to stay and pray. She feels that is what she is called to do.

I had already evacuated with my family. I knew she was there, and we knew two others who had intentionally stayed behind. I got her on the phone, and she said she thought a young couple was going to stay in her apartment complex with her. But they left without telling her, and she was all alone in a 30-unit apartment building. The only other people who were in town was this father and son, who were about four miles away. And so I called them, and they said they had talked to her and she was going to weather the storm with them. I just had a sense she wasn't going to be able to hunker down, and I said, "Guys, can you go get her?"

To make a long story short, it was in the midst of the storm they went over and got her and took her back to the house. They weathered the storm in a neighborhood that turned out to be higher than some of the others. Then I don't know how they got out, but they showed up at different places in Baton Rouge.

The area that she had been in was hit really hard. There was no way she would be able to walk through water. She doesn't have a loud voice. I don't know what would have happened to her, but it would not have been really good. We're just thankful.

There are still a couple of people who are still missing who are kind of high risk, a couple of homeless people who we know, another lady and her son in what's called St. Bernard Parish. We haven't heard from them. If we come out of this with nobody dead it will be miraculous.

We're getting together tonight. There are about 20 people from our church in this area meeting at Starbucks for the first time tonight. We're just going to spend some time hugging each other, praying, and just trading some stories. We will definitely have some groups and Dallas, Houston, and Jackson.

How prepared were you for this scale of disaster?

This is what people have talked about for a long time. People from New Orleans have known it could happen, and they took it seriously. But this was particularly heartbreaking because after the storm went through, we began to see pictures and it looked like we survived. I saw my neighborhood, and I could see the tires of cars, and I thought, "We're going to be okay."

My wife and I were up late on Monday night, and on TV they interviewed a lady who described the water rising an inch every five minutes. I don't know how she knew, but she knew exactly where the levee had broken. I was in disbelief.

Everybody calls it Lake Pontchartrain, but it's a bay. It's not a lake. It's the bay of the Gulf. It's never going to empty. When that happened it was really disheartening.

People in our congregation are committed to one another and the church. I don't know how anybody could go through this without the Lord. Underneath it all, I think there's a general feeling of agreement that God is going to bring some good stuff of this. And we're going to be OK. And we're going to see God do some great things.

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Churches Try to Find Scattered Flocks, Assess Damage From Afar | With churches damaged and congregations dispersed, measuring Katrina's impact has been nearly impossible.

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September (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49