Thank You Smithville, MS

I have been accepted to go on a mission tour this summer in southeast Asia (if you want more info email me at phunter@wclark.k12.in.us) with Athletes in Action.  Because of that I was invited to go to New Orleans and volunteer with Final Four events for AIA and I accepted.

One week after the tornado hit Henryville, I received in the mail a packet from the school in Smithville, MS sent by teacher Jill Horne.  Inside that packet were letters written by students from 3rd grade all the way through to junior high.  Smithville had been hit by an EF 5 tornado last year and it is a town smaller than Henryville and they endured many deaths.

Inside those letters were story after story of encouragment, about turning to God, that things will get better,  and to don't be afraid.  As I sat and read those letters, I started thinking about our town and did we really deserve all of the good things that had happened to us since the storm.  Probably not.  What those letters did was remind me that even though we may not deserve such great things happening to us, we need to deserve it in the future.  We need to reach out and help communities that will go through similar situations.

Since I decided I was going to volunteer in New Orleans, and since Smithville was on the way, I made it a point to stop in and personally thank those students and teachers for thinking about us.  I learned and had reinforced a few lessons that day: young people are pretty neat sometimes, after tragedy, life does go on, the events will never be forgotten as they were eager to tell me their stories from a year ago, and you can lean on others, you have to lean on others to make it through tough times.

Smithville schools are a group of trailers (new school being built now) attached to each other, they have storm shelters outside of the facility (good idea), they have students that were picking on each other, they had events going on, they were living their lives.  Life goes on, I saw it with my own eyes and I heard it with my own ears.

I am typing this today, April 2, our first day back to school in a month and so far, it has been chaos; a good chaos the kind of chaos that sounds like kids ready to get back to some kind of normal.  Give it a couple of days and things will become normal and it will be better and we will all have a great story to tell for the rest of our lives.