We woke up to the sounds of a man banging on our door and calling for everyone in the men’s dormitory where I lived in Clinton, Mississippi to get up. I was a senior at Mississippi College that day in April, 1979. My roommate and I stumbled out into the hallway to find some kind of state official enlisting students to get on a bus and travel 15 miles to work on raising the height of the levees protecting Pearl, MS before the town flooded.

The official continued down the hallway knocking on more doors. My roommate and I talked about it, but concluded we could not miss a full day of classes, so went back to sleep until it was time for breakfast. But then another student started banging on our door.

“Get up,” he said. “You gotta come. We need your help.” We got up and told him we couldn’t miss class. He told us that the school was excusing healthy men from class and that we had to help. He was desperate. We could save his parents’ house. We could save his grandparent’s house. We could save the neighborhood where he grew up. We could not go to class. We had to get on the bus and go help save Pearl, MS. We couldn’t say no, so we got dressed and got on the bus.

I can no longer remember what classes I was taking in my last year at Mississippi College, but I remember shoveling sand into bags for 10 hours right beside the levee. I remember watching row after row of the bags we filled keeping up with the rising waters and that when we left at the end of the day, Pearl, MS was safe and the water was beginning to inch down instead of up against the walls of the levee. The levee that was more than 3 feet higher because a student I had never met pounded on my door and said, “You gotta come. We need your help.”

Terrible things happen every day. This week there was an earthquake in Italy and the levees of south Louisiana remain under water from rains that would not stop. I prayed “Lord have mercy!” when I heard the news, but don’t invest much prayer time in events, programs, or institutions. I don’t think there is anything wrong with praying about them, but it is individual people that inspire me to pray and keep praying.

I am good at praying for specific people to whom I have some kind of personal connection. Some of my personal connections are face-to-face personal and some are much more remote like the sister of a friend, but I need a real connection to keep me praying.

So if I am going to pray about the flooding in south Louisiana, I need a connection. I used to have a cousin down that way, but haven’t heard anything about Carl Wayne in over 20 years. I wonder if he’s okay…