Minnesota church group travels to Kentucky to help after devastating flooding

ROCHESTER, Minn. (FOX 9) – Within the midst of lethal flooding in Kentucky, a bunch of greater than 40 Minnesotans acquired the possibility to assist make a distinction.

A church group from Rochester simply returned from a week-long missions journey. They drove for 15 hours to a land that has been devastated by Mom Nature.

It wasn’t the journey they’d initially deliberate, however college students from Christ Group Church mentioned they would not change a factor.

“I had by no means been part of one thing like that earlier than,” mentioned Carter Goetz, who’s about to begin his senior yr of highschool.

Virtually a yr in the past, Andrea Wageman and different leaders from the church started planning a missions journey for this summer season.

“We simply felt like Kentucky was the place that we had been purported to go,” mentioned Wageman, who serves because the church’s preteen and center faculty director.

On the time, they didn’t know the area would get hit with lethal flooding only a week earlier than their vans had been set to hit the street on July 31.

“They mentioned, ‘should you’re nonetheless keen to come back, now we have be just right for you, and should you’re keen to be versatile, then we’ll shift what we had deliberate so that you can doing flood aid,’” Wageman mentioned.

They shifted gears to flood aid. They spent the week clearing out water and dirt from a church, sorting by donations, and serving to clear properties of the individuals who misplaced all the things. It was the church’s first missions journey offering catastrophe aid.

“It was similar to you’d by no means imagine. It was simply loopy the quantity of water that they’d. That they had water as much as chest stage round the entire metropolis,” Goetz mentioned.

They stayed within the metropolis of Pikeville, which was not closely impacted by the flooding the best way the encircling communities had been, making it a secure place for the group to remain. However Wageman mentioned the group solely needed to journey half-hour to an hour in a number of instructions to see extreme flooding.

“The phrase that simply retains coming to thoughts is ‘devastating.’ As we had been driving by a few of these cities, I simply stored pondering, ‘I do not know the way individuals come again from this,’” Wageman mentioned.

However Wageman answered her personal query: by leaders like her and college students like Goetz. Their group, made up of six adults and 37 teenagers, was the biggest the missions group had there all summer season.

“It simply confirmed how a lot of a necessity there’s round our nation,” Goetz mentioned.

The heartbreaking time in Kentucky was made just a bit brighter by hope from Minnesotans.

“It was an expertise like nothing we have had earlier than and really, I believe, a life-changing expertise for these college students,” Wageman mentioned.