As Darlene Carrigan watched hurricane after hurricane roll through this fall, each time, she had one thought: “I wonder whose life is going to change.”
Her own life changed 15 years ago when Hurricane Katrina hit, though she was nowhere near the path of the storm. God had something else headed her way, something that was going to shake up her life — a friendship God plucked from the hurricane floodwaters and brought right to her doorstep.
Surprise floodwaters
They were floodwaters Shirley Chin never saw coming.
Chin said that growing up in New Orleans, one hears all the time that a hurricane is on its way, but it never comes, or it’s never as bad as people think it will be, “so you just get on with your life.” That’s just what she and her sister were doing in August 2005 as Katrina was barreling down on them — they were getting ready for a garage sale.
“My niece called and said, ‘Have you heard the news? Everybody’s been told to evacuate,’” Chin said.
They hadn’t heard, so they started moving everything inside, planning to come back after the storm and set it all back out. Chin went home from there and told her husband, Lionel, that they needed to leave, but he told her they weren’t going to be able to — they were just going to have to trust God to take care of them through the storm.
“So the hurricane came, and the hurricane left, and everything was fine,” Chin said. “We didn’t have too much damage other than a few shingles.”
But then all of a sudden, water started pouring in under the door. She didn’t know why yet, but she’d later learn that the levees and flood walls protecting the city had failed.
“I looked down the street, and there was water everywhere,” she said.
Escape room
And as it rose in the house, she and her husband and their two youngest children — Lynella, 19, and Lionel Jr., 9 — grabbed some bread and peanut butter and moved into a room they’d built in the attic.
“Thank God for that room — it was a lifesaver,” Chin said.
As the hours passed, it was cold, dark and wet, and the phones weren’t working. After a couple of days, they ran out of food. Then, as Chin and her two children paced around the room on the third night, they heard someone outside yelling Lionel’s name.
He stuck his head out the window, and someone yelled for them to get ready — a boat was coming.
It was a godsend, Chin said — but it was just the beginning. The boat took them to the interstate, which had water lapping at the shoulders on both sides.
“We stayed on the interstate for three nights and three days,” Chin said. “We had no food, no water, nothing to eat, and we had to be careful not to fall in the water.”
At one point, she spotted one of her neighbors on the other side of the road who had brought a whole bag of food with her. Chin called out to her by name and asked if she would share some of it with her family.
The woman said no, but her husband gave them some anyway. Chin was grateful, but she realized then that they were part of a sea of people all fending for themselves. It affirmed something she already knew —they would only make it with God’s provision.
And He would keep providing, though the journey would be long and difficult.
First, the Chins stopped a passing truck on its way to the Superdome with a load of people, and the driver let them squeeze in.
“We were like sardines,” Chin said.
The Superdome was full, and when they moved to the next place, they found they couldn’t stay there either. They sat outside waiting for a long time until they could catch a bus that took them to Baton Rouge, and when they got there, those shelters were full too.
But someone mercifully let them stay a night on the floor, gave them some sandwiches and let them use a phone to make a call to a toll-free number if they wanted.
“I told Lionel to call his company and let them know what happened,” Chin recalled. Her husband was a trucker, and his company — which was based in Pelham — called back later that night and said they were sending another man through there on his route to pick them up.
Landed in Pelham
That’s how they ended up in a hotel in Pelham 10 days after Katrina. And the day after they arrived, they accepted an invitation from a co-worker to visit Westwood Baptist Church, Alabaster.
Westwood is where they crossed paths with Carrigan. But before they met her, they met her teenage daughter, Shelley.
“We didn’t know anybody; we just came to church,” Chin said. “Shelley just came up to my daughter and started talking to her and said, ‘Here’s my number, call us if you need anything.’”
Carrigan added that when her daughter first told her she wanted to reach out to the family, she said no.
“I didn’t have a servant’s heart at that time, and I said absolutely not,” Carrigan admitted. “She begged and pleaded, and my reply was still no. Then she said, ‘You’ll have to explain that to God because He is telling me to do this.’”
So with that, Carrigan relented.
That same morning, others in the church had also showered the Chins with help — money, gift cards, an offer of clothes or a trip to Walmart to buy what they needed.
Chin said they “had never had anything like that happen” to them.
But they still longed for two things and wondered if Carrigan’s family could help — the first was a home-cooked meal, something they hadn’t had in 10 days.
Bonded over faith
It was out of her comfort zone, but Carrigan and a couple of friends from church pulled together a meal for that night and invited the Chins over.
“I found out quickly that it wasn’t us who would bless them — they blessed us,” Carrigan remembered.
They quickly bonded over their faith, and as the night went on, they prayed together, shared Scripture and even got out a keyboard and sang.
“The family told us of the horrific events that they had been through and how God pulled them through,” Carrigan said. “It was the toughest time of their life, but they were so thankful. They were praising God for going through the storm.
“If I just lost everything I had, I don’t know that I could be praising God. It would be hard to step out on faith like they did.”
But the more Carrigan stepped out on faith to serve the Chins, the more she found that muscle grew.
“God was telling me to step out of my comfort zone and that was going to be my new normal,” she explained. “I began to learn that God loves to teach us to love and to do good through obedience. It will draw us closer to Him.”
Carrigan began helping the Chins with the second thing they still needed — a home. She started giving Lynella and Lionel Jr. rides to school, then she and Chin would drive around looking at houses.
After awhile God provided the exact one Chin had hoped for. And along the way, she and Carrigan built a friendship that has lasted 15 years. The Chins were at the top of the invitation list to Shelley’s wedding.
“She knows she can call me any time, day or night,” Carrigan said. “I’m there for her, she’s there for me, and we celebrate the anniversary of Katrina every year because that’s when God changed both of our lives.”
New focus on kids
Once Carrigan was out of her comfort zone, she stayed there. One day when a speaker from the Alabama Baptist Children’s Homes & Family Ministries spoke at Westwood Baptist, Carrigan found her heart was broken for struggling families and children who needed a stable home.
“There are over 6,000 foster children in the state of Alabama,” she lamented. “When I learned this, I had to get busy.”
So she started volunteering at the family care center in Alabaster and “fell in love with it.”
And a year ago, she got a job at the ABCH offices in Birmingham.
“My whole life has changed because of that hurricane, because the Chins came here and because my daughter challenged me to step out on faith,” Carrigan said.
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