FAYETTE – Serese Wiehardt was among the 208 Missouri Baptists to become certified disaster relief volunteers at a recent training event in Waynesville, but she perhaps more than any other knows the eternal impact that disaster relief can have.
A tornado struck Wiehardt’s family farm in March 2006. The community rallied to help victims clear debris, and a team of 12 men and one woman from Unity Baptist Church here were dispatched to the farm along with a Missouri Baptist Disaster Relief chainsaw unit out of Marshall. Wiehardt was getting used to bumper-to-bumper traffic up and down the remote gravel road gawking at the damage, but wasn’t expecting anyone to lend a hand.
“We were just so stunned that they would come,” she said. “We had gone to another church forever but it was people I didn’t know who were coming to help.”
That was just the beginning of God’s work in her life through the disaster. Two months later, Unity Baptist sent a card encouraging the family – along with a love offering. The financial gesture, combined with the labor weeks before, made an impression on her.
“I told my husband that I wanted to be a part of a church that helped others,” she said.
Wiehardt went to the church’s Wednesday night Bible study and began talking with then pastor Ron Rich about the recovery, her family and her faith. He asked her if she was saved, and she said yes. Later that night, as she was driving home, she felt convicted and, in her words, asked Jesus to “come back into her heart.”
“The next couple of weeks I was just amazed at what was happening to me,” she said. “I wanted to read Scripture, the Word started making more sense to me, and something was different. I turned in my keys to our old church and told the pastor that I wasn’t mad or anything, it’s just that something powerful had happened in my life. Two weeks later I sat down with the pastor at Unity and said that I didn’t understand this change, unless it meant that I wasn’t saved in the first place.”
Wiehardt said that revelation rocked her world even more than the tornado.
“I was a nice person, I went to church every Sunday and I even taught Sunday School and helped with the youth,” she said. “I was a nice person. But there are going to be a lot of ‘nice people’ in hell. The Bible is very clear about what it takes to get to Heaven, and that is by accepting Jesus as savior.”
Rick Seaton, director of disaster relief for the Missouri Baptist Convention, said that Wiehardt’s story is the reason so many volunteers respond through Disaster Relief, even if decisions for Christ aren’t immediate.
“It reminds us again that while we serve out of faithfulness, you never know how or who you will touch,” Seaton said. “God absolutely uses disaster relief to touch people’s lives, physically and spiritually.”
Wiehardt’s husband, Carl, had been trained as a chainsaw volunteer for several years with the Unity Baptist unit, but this is the first time Serese has gone through the training. She is now certified in mass care (feeding).
“When he got trained I felt like I should get trained as well, but I didn’t follow through with it,” she said. “Then when the tornado hit Joplin I wanted to go so bad and help like I had been helped. Our experience wasn’t quite the same, because we hadn’t lost any people, but my heart was with them.”
Wiehardt began making arrangements to go to Joplin, but held back when officials asked that only those affiliated with an official, trained organization come into town.
“That’s when I became determined to get trained no matter what,” she said. “Nothing in my life has been like going through that tornado in 2006. Five years later, and we’re still in the process of recovering. When you deal with that kind of loss and devastation, it doesn’t go away. I understand that now. Now that I’m saved, I’m looking for the way God is working on people through their times of trouble.”
BRIAN KOONCE/staff writer
bkoonce@mobaptist.org