After 20 hours buried alive, he needed a shower.
The Pleasant Grove resident stopped by the Southern Baptist disaster relief mobile shower unit at Bethel Baptist Church, Pleasant Grove, to clean up after enduring a jarring ordeal. When the April 27 tornadoes tore through his town, he hid in his bathroom with his family as the twister lifted the house more than a foot from its foundation and slammed it back down several times.
The house’s interior imploded, trapping him beneath the rubble but sparing his family. After daylight broke, rescuers found the man and dug him from the house. He escaped serious injury.
“He said he got closer to God … than he had been in a long time,” said Jim Jones, a disaster relief volunteer from Christ Point Community Church, Sylacauga, who along with his wife, Linda, operates the mobile shower unit in Pleasant Grove.
The Joneses arrived in Pleasant Grove April 29 to start a weeklong shift operating the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions’ (SBOM) shower unit. Since then, they have seen everyone from National Guard soldiers to Amish volunteers from Pennsylvania. An average of 25–30 people per day shower at the unit.
The shower unit includes six curtained shower stalls (three for men, three for women) housed in a large trailer stocked with donated toiletries. A gas water heater keeps the water warm, a generator can keep the lights on if power isn’t available, and water flows from the town’s supply. Stalls and towels are washed after each use, and some units have laundry services.
“It’s a great morale booster, and it also provides a way for people to get a much more restful night of sleep, to be clean and relaxed,” said Gary Green, shower and laundry unit coordinator for Alabama Baptist disaster relief.
Of the currently 27 shower units deployed around the state (13 of which were driven in by other state Baptist conventions through coordination with the North American Mission Board), Green said about half are open to the public. The rest (like the Pleasant Grove unit) are restricted to volunteer workers and local authorities such as state troopers and National Guard soldiers. Most of Alabama’s shower units are owned and managed by individual Baptist associations, and all are funded through the Cooperative Program.
Volunteers need official disaster relief credentials to operate shower units. The Joneses earned theirs after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, taking SBOM courses at Shocco Springs Baptist Conference Center in Talladega.
People who stop by the Pleasant Grove unit get more than a shower, thanks to the urgency the Joneses feel to share Christ with others.
“It is a personal responsibility of mine and my wife, Linda, to tell people about Jesus as we go,” Jim Jones said. “There may not be another chance, and they may not hear it from somebody else.”
Linda Jones strives to help others as Christ commanded His followers to do.
“The first thing (Jesus told us to do) is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and body, and then He said to love others,” she said. “That’s what were doing, loving others by providing cleanliness, giving them clean clothes, giving them a shower.”
Share with others: