On April 27, time ran out for Joyce Lamb and her family.
Spurred on by the TV weather anchor who told them to seek shelter from the tornadoes devastating Alabama, Lamb headed down the stairs of her Birmingham home with her son, Tony, and grandson, Christopher. They never made it.
“We were going to get into the closet, but before we could get into the closet, we just heard this roar come across us,” Lamb recalled.
She shut her eyes and clung to her family as they huddled at the bottom of the stairs. She remembers the sounds of the storm jarring their house — bumping, knocking, popping, cracking, things falling — getting louder with each moment. The air itself seemed to flee from the house.
“We were just praying, ‘Have mercy Lord, have mercy Lord,’ because we didn’t know what to do because it was happening so fast and so quick,” Lamb said.
Almost as quickly as it began, it ended. An eery silence washed over Lamb and her family as they rose to their feet, thankful to be alive.
They forced open the door of their house and peered outside into a twisted reality. Trees lay strewn across the street, pinning smashed cars beneath them as the overwhelming odor of gas wafted through the air.
Lamb shared her story as volunteers with Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical nondenominational disaster relief organization run by evangelist Franklin Graham, sawed through and hauled off a large tree that lay in her back yard.
“I don’t know any of you, but I love you, and I thank you and I pray that God bless and keep each and every one of you in all that you do,” she said.
Samaritan’s Purse set up at First Baptist Church, Tuscaloosa, to assist with cleanup efforts in Tuscaloosa and statewide.
Teams that included members of Southern Baptist churches labored throughout the day at several houses along the street, wielding chainsaws against tangled masses of trees and piling the debris into huge heaps in the houses’ front yards.
Adam Sleeper, a volunteer and member of The Church at Brook Hills, said he volunteered partly to identify, in some small way, with those who suffered.
“The love of Christ spurs us on,” he said. “Meeting Joyce, that puts a face and heart and soul behind everything, so it’s no longer just some people on the other side of town I never go to who are hurting. It’s brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s the lost.”
Henry Blackmon Jr., a retired neighborhood resident, sat on his porch watching the volunteers, who had earlier cleared debris from his back yard. The Army veteran recalled sheltering from the tornadoes in his bathroom with his wife, Shirley, who he describes as a “church-going” person.
Blackmon, who was presented with a signed Bible by the volunteers, said they gave him hope that not everyone has forgotten what it means to be neighborly.
“I’ve never seen any volunteer work,” he said. “People who don’t even live in the community (but help out), that’s something I’ve never seen.”
Victor Floener, a volunteer team leader with Samaritan’s Purse, described his excitement at seeing Christians of different denominations join together in the effort.
“This is not a denominational thing,” he said. “This is obedience, what God has asked us to do, and that is to serve each other and to love your neighbor, and that’s what we’re doing. God is loving these people through us.”
Before going home for the day, Sleeper drove through a maze of debris-strewn streets and National Guard checkpoints to one of the area’s worst-hit neighborhoods. Jumbled heaps of rubble, half-collapsed houses and demolished cars littered the landscape.
Lamb said the terror she felt that day will forever be etched in her memory.
“I’ll never forget the sound of that tornado,” she said.
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