The American Churchman: Hurricane Cleanup, Singleness, and Audience Questions

Hurricane Cleanup, Flood Relief, and the Response on the Ground

Welcome to the American Churchmen podcast brought to you by TruthScript. We are dedicated to inspiring Christian men to embrace their divine calling, exploring a range of topics such as theology, culture, politics, economics, and offering insight in discussions and guidance on those things.

Today we're going to be talking about the hurricane cleanup, as well as an article posted on TruthScript about singleness. I'm your host, John Harris, and today my co-host is my brother David. Matthew is not with us because Matthew is riding out a hurricane tonight.

So he's in Florida. You can pray for him. I told him because he wanted to be here. I said, why don't you focus on what you have coming towards you? It's fine. So Dr. Bob says it's Gordon Sanchez. I don't know if that identity has been revealed, but it sounds like someone's doxing you.

It's alleged. Everything is alleged.

So David is also the president of TruthScript. I don't think we've talked a lot. I had Matthew on and so he wasn't there, but you were there about the retreat. Maybe we should start with that and we'll get back into the attributes of God discussion when Matthew returns next week.

But instead of doing that, why don't we talk about the weekend, not last weekend, but the weekend before that up in the Adirondacks. You were there, David. So what did you think?

I was there. I thought it went really well. It was a really, really good time. I look forward to this every single year. I just look forward to being at the venue, period. It's the perfect time to be in the Adirondack Mountains.

It's beautiful. It's crisp at night. You sit around the fire. You have really interesting conversations with guys. Really, it's become all over the country. We had a guy from, I think, Greece. Who, I don't know if he, I guess he, I think he lives here, but we had people come up from Georgia.

I think somebody came up from Florida. So just guys from all over the country, guys from, you know, a number of different Protestant traditions. We had Presbyterians there, Baptists, non-denominational folks, even people who would be probably more charismatic, I guess, but really good unity, you know, robust singing together and a number of really great messages from Dr. Richard Vargas, from you, from A .D. Robles, and from, oh man, now I'm missing.

Oh, and from Erwin.

Erwin Ramirez.

Erwin Ramirez.

Your own father.

And my own father, yeah. I was running around. I missed a lot of the speaking because I was putting out little fires here and there, but yeah, great time. Topic, Dr. Vargas talked about the history of fundamentalism and why you don't need to be ashamed to be called a fundamentalist among other things.

But yeah, great time.

The, what do you call it? The scale. The scale of the event is pretty good because when you have between, depending on the year, you know, between 50 and 100 guys, this year it was 70 guys. There's a camaraderie you can have.

You can actually talk to people and get to know them. And you start recognizing the same people year after year. And you start to become familiar with their names and their stories. And I know that some good relationships have formed from it.

But it's also pretty accessible. And I think in the wake of the Steve Lawson thing, especially there's guys who would go to these big conferences that are now realizing, man, we don't actually know these people.

They're in the green room. They can come out on stage for a few minutes and even tear it up on, on the pulpit. And, but did they actually avert you in character? Are they people worth emulating? It's somewhat questionable now.

And that's the case when your life is mostly hidden and the retreats aren't like that. We're all out there. You're going to see the flaws. And I wanted to actually show people, speaking of flaws. So Andrew, the guy, we actually had this whole thing recorded and we're going to be posting the links that true script.

So follow true scripts on X or on Facebook. I think it, are those the only two places we have Instagram, right?

We have Instagram.

Yeah.

Hopefully that should be, we've connected the, the account. So that should, there should be more Instagram posts very soon.

Well, yeah. I'm one of those three. If you follow us, then you will get the update and there will be videos of the talk. So I got the tape from Andrew today of the 80 Robles talk, which was really good.

He was talking about friends and enemies and I'll see if I can post that later tonight or tomorrow. But this is what, this is how it began. Hey, all right. So I always like to say whenever I talk somewhere that I'm not, I'm not preaching today.

I'm like, okay.

It's okay.

Yeah.

So I, I figured I would just show the, it's real it's raw. There's no embellishment or I don't know, fine editing. We didn't take it out. We just left it in. I think Andrew thought it was better.

Anyone who is, anyone who is speaking there, you get to rub shoulders with them.

You know,.

One-on-one you get to eat, you get to have share meals with them,.

You know,.

Potentially you get to talk to them.

Or kayak out on the lake or go fishing. So yeah, there's no, there's. I think the way it was put several times is there's no green room.

Here.

There's no place where the, the people who are speaking are separated from the people who are attending. It's a very, you know everybody's kind of having the same experience. So yeah, great time. Highly, highly recommend.

Well,.

If you have questions or comments as we go through the podcast, please let us know. We're streaming right now on rumble X, YouTube and Facebook, and you can ask questions. I think on all of those, except rumble.

So Matt says John's green room is the campfire. Matt actually was the one who did our music, Matt Boresh and did a good job. And greetings from Albuquerque says Ray.

Ray is Spanish for King.

Is that why L Ray is the King?

Is that right?

Yep.

Okay. So the more,.

You know,.

Yeah,.

If you are blah, these are things that,.

You know,.

Uh,.

Gordon Sanchez on this supposedly conservative podcast, bunch of grifters, sad, very sad.

Uh,.

Wow.

Traders. Okay. I don't know. I don't know if it's FEMA or us. I think, I think Betty's calling us traders. Hi from Florida.

Uh,.

I hope you're safe down there. I was looking at some of the weather channel stuff and it looks like this is going to get, the intensity will go down. I think it's category five right now, but the, the geographic area will be larger than it is right now.

And it looks like it's already half the state of Florida. So this is going to be intense and it'll be interesting to see,.

Um,.

What happens.

The Hurricane Path, Flood Damage, and Volunteer Relief Efforts

Uh,.

Mary asks when will registration be open for next year. For the fundamentals,.

Uh,.

Men's conference?

Uh,.

Good question.

Uh,.

Probably by the end of this year. So by like December, I'm thinking maybe November.

Uh,.

There's just a bunch of other things we're doing.

Uh,.

One of them is a,.

Um,.

Church history conference that we're going to have next April. So stay tuned for that. There's more announcements coming.

Uh,.

Let's get to the topic at hand.

David,.

You were in,.

Um,.

Where were you. Actually, you have a slideshow.

I know.

Yeah.

Um,.

Let me,.

Let me actually share a map really quick. I taught.

So I don't think,.

I don't think it's on there. I don't know where it went.

Well,.

I turned it off. So let me put it back on again. Let me just share.

Okay.

For a second. If we're seeing,.

Let me get rid of AD by AD.

Okay.

So,.

Um,.

Let me know if this is moving, this moving.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we'll zoom out a little bit. So here is,.

Um,.

Let me,.

Uh,.

Let me put the terrain on. So yeah,.

See,.

That's a nice map. You can tell all the mountains and hills and everything.

So, um,.

Tennessee river Valley is up here.

The,.

The hurricane, when it came up, this is as far as I understand it, kind of the reason why it was so bad,.

Um,.

Where it hit is kind of veered off this way a little bit. And the expectation was for it to go more towards Nashville quicker, but instead it kind of, because there was another front that had just come through.

Also the front had saturated all the ground. It rained a lot in this, this area, the smoky mountains and the blue Ridge mountains.

Um,.

And you'll see all these things pop up because roads are out everywhere. So this area, Asheville, Nashville is about a thousand feet higher than the surrounding region. So it's like a thousand feet higher than Atlanta than Knoxville.

Um,.

So it's,.

It's higher up, but all these little towns, you can kind of tell with the topography, are just there,.

Um,.

There's streams and creeks and rivers everywhere.

The main,.

The two main rivers are the French broad river and the, uh, I'm gonna switch over to this one, the French broad river and the pigeon river. So this is Newport, Tennessee.

Um,.

This is a picture that I took on Saturday. That's a, that's a really actually like large RV, just full of, of debris. The water,.

Um,.

In the pigeon river exceeded, at least in the particular area that we were,.

Uh,.

27 feet. So that's 27 feet higher than it's normal,.

Uh,.

Where it's normally flowing. So we, we went to about five towns.

Um,.

This is a group I linked up with the church in Knoxville. This is the town of Marshall. This is where I spent most of the day. It's a, it's a, it's an idyllic town. It's one of the most beautiful towns I think I've seen.

Like I saw the pictures beforehand, the whole town is kind of like half a mile strip,.

You know,.

But it just has a very old classic town and it had really been revitalized and,.

Um,.

It was kind of trendy.

Um,.

So this is, this is it now, this is a picture that I took.

Um,.

I mean,.

Obviously the picture's not as good. You have to zoom, zoom in to see,.

Um,.

Some of the details. You can see some, there's some damage on the side. There's debris, but if you zoom in, you see the train tracks just completely,.

Um,.

Taken off.

That,.

The train, there was a train running like four times a week into that town. It may never run again.

Um,.

This is main street. So this is kind of typical in the towns.

Um,.

But the first story of most buildings, like most of the first story, cause you got to figure 27 feet,.

Um,.

Was just completely, it was just mud basically.

And,.

And the mud is still there. The water receded, the mud stayed behind. So every, most everything,.

Where's the asphalt.

Uh,.

It all just got wiped away. Pretty much still there. It's, it's covered in mud cause mud covers absolutely everything.

Um,.

You can't see in this picture. I honestly, I didn't take a ton of pictures because I was working.

Um,.

And I wasn't thinking of taking pictures. So I just have a few, I have a few videos too,.

But,.

Um,.

Further on where that Jeep is coming in, there's several houses there and there's, they're just gone. There's nothing there.

They,.

They just were completely wiped away. So Marshall. Actually, several people did die in Marshall. I don't know how many,.

Um,.

There's still so many people missing. We don't really know,.

You know,.

It's going to be a while before we know the exact numbers of how many people,.

Um,.

Are,.

Are gone. I'm just going to go back to this one really quick.

But,.

Um,.

What happened was, this was like eight o 'clock in the morning. When there was an alert that went out,.

Um,.

Basically if you need, if you,.

Uh,.

If you need oxygen, if you have any kind of like medical reliability on, on anything, go out and get it. And then like 20 minutes later, another emergency broadcast came in that said shelter in place.

So people stayed, a lot of people stayed put because it was like,.

Okay,.

We're supposed to shelter, but you can't shelter if you're on the river. And this water came so fast,.

You know,.

You might've had a few minutes. So a lot of people just got washed away,.

You know, within,.

Within seconds or minutes at best.

Um,.

So,.

So Marshall wasn't as bad as other, other towns.

Um,.

Like chimney rock is like,.

Is gone.

Um,.

For the most, most part, there's a little of the main stretch that's still there, but so much road is washed out.

Um,.

You know,.

In some places like miles of road, just completely gone.

Um, and.

I guess sort of, I I've been trying to sort of process,.

Um,.

You know, stop sharing this. I've been trying to process sort of what we saw on,.

Um,.

On Saturday. So me, me and a friend went up, we spent about like probably 12 hours in the mountains. We went to one town,.

Uh,.

And hot Springs. And hot Springs was very tight. It's a tiny town. It's like,.

I don't know,.

Maybe a quarter of a mile, the main street.

Um,.

And the bridge held, so people have been able to move in and out of that town, but it's pretty much ruined.

I mean,.

Like big sections of road washed away buildings,.

You know,.

Completely filled up with mud. And this mud is toxic because the Asheville,.

Uh,.

Sewage system like failed. And that all went into the sewage of like 115 ,000 people just went straight into the river. So it's in the mud. The stench was horrible.

I mean,.

It smelled like feces.

Um,.

I wound up in an old mill that had been converted into sort of like an office building slash apartment complex. And I was just shoveling this mud out and like cutting out drywall for.

The day.

Um,.

But yeah, it's going to be,.

Um, I,.

One of the reasons why I wanted to, I wanted to go just because as soon as it happened, I was in New York for the retreat. I flew back to Tennessee and I just wanted to get up. I just wanted to help.

You know,.

A lot of people have been texting me and calling me and saying like, what can I do? What can I do? There's been, I think a lot of urgency because people have felt like there, there hasn't been a response,.

Um,.

Especially from the feds.

So, um,.

A few things that I noticed. So I didn't see there, there were things that I've seen online that I did not see. So I did not see,.

Um,.

You know,.

Bodies strewn all over the place and,.

And,.

And the smell of, of like death in the air, but there may be places where that's happened.

Just,.

It's not in those like five towns that I was in. Those may be more remote areas. I'm not sure. I do know they found bodies around where I was,.

But, um,.

I didn't,.

I didn't see her experience that,.

Uh,.

But,.

Um,.

There were no feds anywhere. I didn't see even a whisper of FEMA or the national guard or any state,.

Nothing.

The,.

In fact,.

The only authorities I saw at any point, and this is across five towns,.

Uh,.

Where some cops pulled up in an ATV once and just,.

You know,.

Said like,.

Hey,.

You guys good. You need anything? And then they took off.

Other than that,.

It was a 100 volunteer effort. And it actually, I was trying to think of what to compare it to. And the thing that stuck out to me the most was nine 12. So if you remember the day after nine 11,.

Um,.

Every,.

Just everybody was sort of like your friend that day,.

You know, there,.

There was just this sort of common camaraderie political differences. Didn't matter. Like you, we are sort of all Americans.

I,.

This is the,.

The most I've ever seen that spirit. And partially because like these towns,.

This isn't within the,.

Um,.

The influence of Asheville and Asheville is not a red place. Like Asheville is pretty blue. And even the town that I was in was a,.

You know,.

Like I said, very trendy.

I mean,.

There's one church, the church is looking for a pastor. It's a Presbyterian church,.

Um,.

In downtown.

Uh,.

So like either Christian influence isn't, isn't super big there. There's like crystal shops and magic shops and things like that. So it's, it struck me as like,.

Oh,.

This is a very like progressive town.

Um,.

You know,.

Sort of a, like if you're from New York, like Woodstock from California, like Santa Monica, that's kind of, it was kind of the vibe that I got.

Um,.

But the people who had organized and they were extremely organized because.

This,.

This town is at the bottom of a, of a hill.

Um,.

And then like at the top of the hill, there's sort of the corporate stretch of the town. And then at the bottom is the actual town, like the riverfront. And they weren't allowing any vehicles down instead.

Um,.

You would,.

They would shuttle people,.

Volunteers,.

Because volunteers have poured in from every corner of the country to come help here. There's more volunteers than,.

Um,.

You know,.

There,.

There's a lot of help.

Um,.

Not everyone has a helicopter. That's kind of the issue, but there's plenty of people on the ground, like shoveling out stuff and,.

You know,.

Um,.

Supplies. People are bringing supplies like crazy. So that, that hasn't really been a huge issue.

Um,.

But they had a shuttle system to bring people down and bring them back up.

Um,.

It was super organized. They had all the PPE because again, this mud is extremely toxic.

So,.

You know,.

We had full body suits on respirators,.

Um,.

Gloves.

I sort of shed like one by one because it was so hot,.

Um,.

Shoveling the stuff out.

Uh,.

But two, one thing I noticed was,.

Um,.

Even without any like outside help,.

You know, I mean,.

There was outside help, but it was all private. It's all just citizens.

Um,.

You know,.

Mostly from Tennessee and North Carolina.

Um,.

The,.

Uh,.

Pretty much all of the infrastructure were like red state people. So there was a sign that I saw at one, like at one point it said,.

Um,.

Uh,.

Free massage for,.

You know,.

For,.

For volunteers. So people who have like come in to help, like if you go to,.

You know,.

If you go to my, I'll give you a free massage. And I just had, I would have this moment.

I'm like,.

This is really cool that people are, nobody's fighting. It's very obvious that some people here are very left. Some people are very right, but everyone is like pitching in working together and trying to help one another to help these people who have lost everything.

But if you zoom out a little bit and think about it, all of the infrastructure is like a guy pulls up in a Trump hat and he's.

Got,.

You know,.

Like a side by side,.

You know, a bunch of, a bunch of,.

Um,.

Guys with camo and chainsaws,.

Um,.

Without red state America, people would be struggling a lot more.

It really,.

It's like red state America that has come in to save the day. Um,.

You know,.

Here, and that's not to say that like people who are more progressive were not,.

You know,.

Cause I was volunteering next to this guy who had,.

You know,.

He was very obviously like a hippie,.

But,.

Um,.

Pretty much all the infrastructure we're,.

We're,.

We're red state people.

FEMA, Federal Neglect, and the Politics of Disaster Response

Um,.

So.

Yeah.

I wonder if the lack of response from FEMA is, uh, swaying any of these so-called,.

Well,.

You said hippie,.

But,.

Uh,.

More progressive,.

What?

I don't know.

They, they're like,.

Cause I saw there was a guy on X who,.

Uh,.

Was made a video,.

Uh,.

Just crying about like he was going to vote for Harris. And,.

Uh,.

Now he's not because of the lack of response from FEMA.

Uh,.

Like that would became his one issue. And I think in those moments that does become your issue, like all the other issues start fading in the background. And then you're like my town, my life, my people.

Yeah.

I did notice.

Um,.

So I had a lot of good conversations with people throughout the.

Day.

Some,.

You know,.

Fairly extended cause you're working next to people,.

Um,.

Breaking bread with them.

Um,.

Nobody wanted FEMA there. Like universally nobody wants FEMA.

Um,.

In fact,.

People,.

Every,.

Almost everybody I encountered was making a, would make a crack about it.

Like,.

At least we don't have FEMA here.

So it's,.

It's kind of like on one hand,.

Um,.

Cause you know,.

A lot of people are saying, where's FEMA, where's FEMA. And it's a good question. Where is FEMA? Because that's our, that's our money that pays for FEMA. So where are they?

Where,.

Where they could at least just give the money back to us or give the money back to these people,.