Quilts

It has been really cold here, for Biloxi, I mean. It got down around 26' Thursday night. I wondered why I had no water in my little RV when I flushed the toilet at 5:00 am. It took awhile for me to figure out that it was because the hose that hooks me up to the water supply was frozen. And when I got dressed it felt like my underwear had been kept in the freezer. It was still pretty cold during the day, and I took an application for help from a woman who needed jackets for her children. We have a voucher arrangement with a thrift store down the street that would help with the jackets. When I found out that she also needed bedding, I offered her some sheets and quilts from our supply. The quilt supply was getting pretty low. I went into Judy's office to tell her, and she assured me that contributions of bedding were already on the way.

Within minutes, she got a call from someone looking for blankets. It seems that the FEMA Village about 2 miles away from us had lost power during the morning. A transformer had cut out. There was no heat in the trailers, and the woman on the phone wanted to know if we had blankets. Not really. Not anymore. Six of us sat down and prayed for blankets. Judy decided that we should use some of the Wal-Mart cards we keep for emergencies and buy blankets to last until our supply arrived. We thought that several hundred dollars worth of blankets would last until the emergency was over. Lisa, the Medical Administrative Assistant and I dropped everything to hop into my car and drive to the largest Wal-Mart nearby. We found comforters on special; Twin size for $15 and Queen/King size for $25. We loaded up three baskets with 7 Twin-size and 7 Queen-size comforters and got into the check-out line. Suddenly it occured to me that I had automatically hopped into my own little Honda Civic instead of taking one of the Suburbans or the Dodge Caravan. My Honda was still full of my books, jackets, a suitcase with summer clothes and the long carrier with my alb in it. I looked at the comforters stacked over the tops of the baskets. "How will we get all these blankets in my little car?" I said to Lisa. She smiled. "Do you think that if the Lord can send us the blankets we need, he can't get all these comforters into your car? They'll fit." It looked impossible, even beside the car, but after moving bags around in the trunk and squishing the comforters into the smallest possible spaces, We got them all in. The top one popped out of the trunk when we opened it up, and the back seat was piled to the ceiling. But they were all there.

The word got out quickly, and even when we limited the distribution of comforters to one per family, we were down to one quilt at the end of the afternoon. It was about 5:30 when the phone rang again about blankets. Judy had been on the phone most of the afternoon, looking for blankets and the manager of the warehouse that supplies many of the relief efforts was on the phone. He heard that we needed blankets and he had a supply. "How many do you need?" Judy explained the situation. "Would 100 be enough?" he asked. "Bless you. You are the answer to our prayers." The blankets were delivered a couple of hours later. Some of the blankets are thick lambswool that would keep anyone warm, and some are heavy cotton jacquard. We haven't opened all the boxes yet, but this is a wonderful beginning.