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LA PLACE, La.?The 53-year-old Southlake woman had one gospel tract left to share with a family lined up to receive food from the SBTC Disaster Relief volunteers working in Kenner, La., near New Orleans.
“As a car pulled up, we’d say, ‘Hi, how are you? Do you want some lunch?'”
When asked “How are you doing?” some of the displaced Louisianans shared how Hurricane Katrina had left them destitute and hungry. After awhile, the looks on their faces seemed similar to Charmaine Fenstermacher as she sought to offer encouragement while passing out food.
“I had three tracts left and I was using them sparingly,” she remembered, aware that many of the residents had already heard the gospel shared over the course of the week during food distribution efforts. “Some of them wanted to talk and it was so nice to hear what they had to say.” Most of the people Fenstermacher met were poor and their stories began running together as they described similar circumstances of coping with the disaster.
When the black sedan rolled to the front of the line, Fenstermacher recognized the family to be of Middle Eastern descent.
“The mother was wearing a beautiful silk gown with gold threads. It was covering her arms as she reached out for food. She told me they had lost everything in the hurricane.”
Weeks later, Fenstermacher is still amazed by the words God gave to her.
“I reached in and handed them lunch and we talked a little since there was a long line ahead of me. It surprised me the things I asked because I’m not normally so bold.
“Do you know Jesus?” she asked the man, his wife and their teenage son, uncertain of the response she’d get.
“The husband spoke for the family and said, ‘We have been Muslim.’ I thought that was an odd way to put it?it was not ‘we are Muslim.'”
She described the man’s gratitude for the food and resources freely given to him and his neighbors in the days following the hurricane. “‘Our own people did not help us,'” she remembered him saying.
As Fenstermacher offered a tract and a brief gospel testimony, she recounted the man’s response: “‘You know, we have heard that from other people. Who is this Jesus?'” she heard him ask.
“I thought, ‘Is this really happening to me? I hope I can explain this,'” Fenstermacher recalled. “It was not me at all. The Holy Spirit took over and I just basically explained what salvation is?that you speak out and repent and are sorry for your sins. I told them God loved us so much that he gave us his Son who died for each and every one of us and that the neatest thing is the resurrection.”
To Fenstermacher the entire conversation seemed to have lasted forever, but she realized it was only a minute or two that she had to spend with the family.
“He didn’t say anything for awhile and so I asked, ‘Would you like to say a prayer of salvation?'” The mother shook her head positively, the husband answered, “Yes,” as did the son, she recalled.
Fenstermacher reached into the car to hold their hands as she led them in prayer. “Then the husband said, ‘We want to do that!’ and I said, ‘You just did.'”
Even though her disaster relief training advised against close physical contact with evacuees, Fenstermacher said only her legs were left hanging out of the car as she reached in to hug her new friends.
“I’ve always planted seeds, but I had never been there beside a person who made a decision to follow Christ. It finally happened to me,” she announced, appreciative of the many Christians who had gone before her, sharing God’s love with this family. “It was awesome that I was the one witnessing this and God did his work through me.”
