When Hurricane Katrina hit the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana, thousands of Americans became homeless overnight. Thousands of miles away in Colorado, I was drowsily stumbling through my first year of college.
A group of adults from my church made an announcement 2 weeks after Katrina hit that they were heading down to Biloxi to work with Samaritan’s Purse in Emergency Relief work for the victims of Katrina. I felt inexplicably compelled to dismiss school and work and head down with the varied group. 
As we worked tarping roofs and making runs to nearby hospitals, I felt hugely motivated. The total destruction as far as the eye could see was so overwhelming and yet everywhere I looked–there was generosity and love overflowing.
There is one moment that I remember most clearly: we were working in an area that used to be a mobile home park when I walked up to one of hundreds of piles of debris. My jeans were sticking to my legs from the heat and the humidity and I could hear the ocean surf. I climbed to the top of the pile and looked out over the coast..All buildings had been swept away leaving behind only their cement foundations; overhead, a helicopter noisily flew by. I could see families picking their way through the debris or just sitting on the cement block that once was their home. I can remember feeling insignificant in the face of such devastation and horror. 
Later that day we were driving through the scarred streets when a woman beckoned us to a nearby house. A little boy was sitting in the front yard, and when we walked into the house to find an elderly man with an ashen face asleep on a lazyboy. The man’s name was Larry, and he was dying from a lack of insulin to treat his diabetes when his visiting nurse had failed to appear for 2 weeks. We got him to our van, and rushed him to the e.r. Back at Larry’s house, I sat beside the little boy, Joey. We had soccers in the van to give to kids, and after inflating the soccer, I played a little kickball with Joey. “Do you like soccer?” I asked him as I passed the ball over the lawn. “Yeah…I think I’ll be a soccer player when I get older.” he replied with a weak grin. I learned from a neighbor that Joey’s parents had been killed when the hurricane hit and the neighbors had been watching him since.
It hit me as we drove away later that night, that when I felt without purpose or insignificant I was, in fact, focusing too much on the big picture. One cannot set out to help every person in the world–you get lost in the enormity of the world’s problems. But, if you can set aside the time to let God use you with one person at a time–the enormity shrinks to an individual solution. I have always had a desire to help others and that moment standing on Biloxi coast, I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life helping others in the face of unwielding destitution.
