POPLAR BLUFF, Mo.—Three Texans on Mission disaster relief leaders motored down a country road in southeast Missouri where a tornado had devastated homes and trees. Then they had what Paul Henry later called a “divine appointment.”
Jacob Moneybrake, Texans on Mission’s new associate director of disaster relief, was in the truck with Henry and Wendell Romans.
“I had never seen anything like it, the devastation,” Moneybrake said of the scene in southeastern Missouri. “The further we went, the worse it got. I thought, ‘We’re here to take trees off homes, but the houses were beyond saving.’”
Henry, the Texans on Mission incident commander, said: “As we neared the end of the damaged area, a man named Jake was sitting in his pickup truck by the side of the road next to a driveway and waved us down.
“He was curious about what we were doing in the area,” Henry said. After the Texans on Mission team explained, Jake “pointed and shared that his brother had been killed in his home, and his sister-in-law had crawled out of the rubble that was once their house.”
No damaged trees threatened what structures remained, so Wendell Romans suggested the Texans on Mission team “follow Jake to his brother’s homesite and assess what he wanted us to do,” Henry said.
“As Jake explained the trees that needed to be cut and removed, he became visibly emotional.” Henry said. “Through it all, we were able to guide Jake to accept the Lord.”
Earlier in the day, the team had experienced various delays in getting to the scene of the worst damage.
“What made this experience even more profound for us was reflecting on how the events of the day had initially gone wrong, delaying our trip to Jake’s brother’s property. It was clearly a divine appointment.”
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Moneybrake walked away from the others to retrieve mail from the mailbox for Jake. It had been a difficult morning for the team, and he had an “honest conversation with the Lord” as he walked.
Moneybrake was focused on the work that needed to be done but the challenges that day made it difficult to plan what work to do. When he got back to the others, Jake had made his profession of faith in Christ.
“Then I prayed: Lord, give me your heart for these survivors,” Moneybrake said. “It was a life-changing experience. … I went on a work trip and came home from a mission trip.”
After the team returned to the command center at Temple Baptist Church in Poplar Bluff, wind gusts reached 55 mph and “blew the back steps of the command center across the parking lot,” Henry said. “Later, another gust of wind caught one of the church’s double glass doors—the doors we use to access the building—slammed it open, and tore it off its hinges.
“I’m still trying to understand the deeper meaning behind these disturbances in the otherwise quiet tranquility of this disaster,” he said.
Moneybrake said he and Romans returned the next day to the property where Jake’s brother had died. “We went back to the valley of death. I watched the Lord, with our ministry, wrap arms around these people.”
As of Sunday, March 23, 59 Texans on Mission volunteers were working in the Poplar Bluff area, with multiple pieces of equipment from around Texas.
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