What I Learned From Hosting a Hurricane Family

The hurricanes may be over, but our true test of compassion has just begun. When I first took hurricane survivor Mable Brown and her family into my home, my only thought was, "I have got to get this woman and her kids out of harm's way." I couldn't pull everybody out of the muck of New Orleans, but I could give this one family a safe place to stay.

The front side of the story is how an affluent suburban community opened their homes to five moms and 14 kids. And how the most resourceful woman in America--hotel maid Mable Brown--saved herself, her kids and her entire extended family by keeping her wits about her and trusting the voice of a stranger on the phone.

But the backside of the story, the one that people often don't think about is--how do you maintain your compassion when the feel good part of your good deed is over? And how do you learn to let people help you, when you've always survived by going at it alone?

It's been three weeks since Mable Brown first called me from her cell phone inside the Astrodome. Appropriately enough, that first call came on my birthday. I'm beginning to wonder if it wasn't God's way of telling me, "It's time to grow up."

As great as it felt to help Mable and her family in those first few days, the insights I've gained since then have made me think about what it really means to be a child of God. And how you have to open your mind and get over yourself, if you really want to make a difference.

The day after Mable Brown and her sisters landed in sleepy Snellville, Georgia, a friend and I drove back to the downtown Atlanta Greyhound station to see if we could locate their missing boxes of Red Cross supplies that had gotten lost on the bus.

With the refugee moms asleep and their kids playing at my neighbor's pool, I began to navigate the grindingly slow world of the poor. As the overworked, yet surprisingly cheerful Greyhound clerk led me to the caged-off room of boxes, I naively wondered why they hadn't just looked it up on the computer and shipped them out to my house the way the airlines do.

When I called my husband from the sea of dirty boxes to confirm the claim check numbers, I heard all the kids laughing and splashing in the background, and I was struck by the disparity between our worlds. Mable and crew were back home living in my life, where a quick call from your cell phone brings a guy with pizza to the side of your pool.

And I was sitting in a dirty bus station spending hours looking for boxes of blankets and pajamas--free supplies that a family who had just lost everything was anxious to claim.

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