My head was aching, and my body was shivering on the morning of August 29, 2005.
Two days prior, while on retreat with the Delta State Reformed University Fellowship leadership team, I had futilely attempted multiple times to water ski on Wolf Lake in Yazoo County.
I drank a lot of lake water that Saturday, which resulted in an infection from the devil himself.
I was curled up in a blanket in my dorm room bed that Monday, watching the news reports of Hurricane Katrina as she made landfall on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in southeast Louisiana.
In 2005, I was not a very good student. In fact, I was a directionless, insufferable wreck of a student. I was in and out of trouble with the dean, and although I was four years into various undergraduate majors, I had no immediate plans to graduate.
I missed class that Monday, sick from whatever parasites were in the murky lake waters that past weekend. On Tuesday, I dragged myself to Dr. Albert Nylander’s Sociology of Education class, where I watched for the first time a live feed of the devastation in the town of Waveland in Hancock County.
By mid-week, I was not feeling much better, and I laid in my bed, watching as Katrina’s aftermath turned to more horrors with the flooding in New Orleans.
Later in the week, hundreds of people from the coast and Louisiana had arrived in Cleveland and on Delta State’s campus, seeking refuge.
Those who were able sent supplies to the south.
By week’s end, I was on the mend, and my campus minister Josh Martin had contacted me that Friday and asked if I would travel with him and a couple of other RUF students to a Presbyterian church in Brookhaven, where hundreds of refugees had been camped out.
Our task was to take to the church a load of much-needed supplies.
When we arrived at the church that Saturday, I was astounded at the number of people from the coastal area who were there.
We unloaded our supplies into a kitchen area, and that is when I stumbled upon stacks of Anheuser-Busch canned drinking water.
I looked at the cans, and I chuckled. I had only known Anheuser-Busch to produce beer.
A person at the church invited us to grab a can if we wanted, and I obliged.
I had no intention of drinking the water, but I thought that the boys back at the dorm in Cleveland would be as amused as I was at its manufacturer.
I carried that can of water back to Cleveland, and when I arrived at the then New Men’s dorm on Delta State’s campus, I showed it to my friends.
They were less impressed than I was.
So, I placed the can on my computer desk, and that is where it stayed until the end of the semester.
What started as an immature joke became a keepsake from one of the heaviest moments in Mississippi’s history.
Over the past 20 years, I have moved about 10 different times, and everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve taken that unopened can of Anheuser-Busch water. It sits in my “man cave” cabinet to this day as a reminder of Hurricane Katrina.
About a year and a half after the storm hit, I had an opportunity to travel with DSU’s RUF group to Bay Saint Louis for a weekend mission trip.
We were there to support a Katrina-inspired church plant called Lagniappe Presbyterian Church.
On the Saturday we worked, we had the opportunity to clean debris out of a historic home in the city.
The man overseeing the project told us that the first postmaster general in Bay Saint Louis’s history had owned the home. Our task was to clean as much mud and trash out of the interior as we could.
Following that day of hard labor, we went to church.
I cannot recall the preacher’s name who delivered the message that Sunday morning, but I remember the sermon very well.
He said, “The destruction that you see here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast is a direct reflection of our hearts.”
I thought that was heavy. And true.
I’m not at all sure if the historical commission in Bay Saint Louis was able to save that old house from demolition, but I know that lots of souls were saved as a result of Katrina and the missions that grew up around the devastation.
I rode away from the coast that weekend a changed person.
My cabinet at home has a lot of mementos that I have collected from every city I’ve lived in over the past 20 to 30 years. When anybody asks why I have a beat up can of drinking water in there, it gives me the chance to talk about Katrina and the opportunities I had to grow as a person because of my interactions with the storm’s victims.
Occasionally, someone will ask me if I ever plan to pop it open and take a drink.
I wouldn’t dare.
That’s some special water, and I would imagine that if consumed at this point, it might mean a fate worse than anything Wolf Lake could conjure.
