"We just wanna go home."

The trip to New Orleans was great! It was exciting to help rebuild, and great to make new friends -- but the real treasure was getting to hear people's stories. One phrase could be heard in every one of them: "We just wanted to go home." June said that when the call came saying they'd better get out, she and her husband left for her sister's home in Texas. Her husband passed away while they were there. As soon as she could, she returned home. I asked her what it was like coming home. "Everything was grey!" she said. "The trees were grey, the grass was grey, the houses were grey -- everything was grey!"

Tony's house sits on Abundance Street. It had eight feet of water inside it at one time. As soon as the water resided, but before the barricades had been taken down, he came home to open up his windows so things could dry out. He has stripped the woodwork down to its natural cypress beauty and will put it back when the walls are repaired. He showed us photos of the neighborhood when it was under water. Many of the people in his neighborhood are elderly. Some of them didn't make it through the storm. Hearts that were weak grew weaker. Depression is commonplace.

One young woman talked to us from her front porch. She told us about her whole extended family leaving New Orleans together. They rented a block of hotel rooms for as long as they could afford it while they waited to be able to come home. Finally they brought her father back, and he was able to be home for a year before he died. "At least he died at home," she said.

I couldn't help thinking of Psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon (or Cincinnatti or Houston or Phoenix, or any of the other cities to which these Gulf Coast natives were exiled) -- there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion (New Orleans). On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' ('Play us some New Orleans jazz!') How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" We just want to go home.