Hurricane Helene Mission Opportunity – April 21-25, 2025 (archived)

This is an archived event of the Henry County Baptist Association of Virginia.

Here is a link to either view or download our gallery of pictures: Hurricane Helene Rebuild Mission Trip Powerpoint Presentation. This will work best if you ‘DOWNLOAD’ and show in PowerPoint (or clone office suite – WPS, LibreOffice, etc.) as opposed to ‘VIEW’ this link online, which is slow and slide titling isn’t quite right.

We sent 16 volunteers to Damascus, VA to help rebuild homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Helene Monday, April 21 (the day after Easter Sunday), and worked through Friday, April 25 over the Martinsville/Henry County School Spring Break (April 18-27) of 2025. The original plan was to drive home Saturday morning; but by decision of the group, we left after we were done for the day on Friday.

The timing was purposefully set over our public school Spring Break to be an opportunity for mothers and/or fathers to take their teens, giving them a mission experience while meeting real needs of our neighbors to the west. We ended up with 2 teen boys who accompanied their father and grandparents.
Our volunteers were housed by One Way Ministries, 1004 S Shady Ave, Damascus, VA. BGAV provided the food, and 2 of our volunteers coordinated the kitchen. The and 2 other volunteers cooked for the whole team. And we ate WELL! Many thanks from the whole team!

We worked on 5 houses while we were there:

On the 1st house, the Damascus Senior Citizens Home, we placed a handicap ramp and replaced two doors in the basement. This work was accomplished by the time the second wave of team members arrived in town. The first wave was anxious to get going early, and they did!

On the 2nd house, Steve Lovins’ cabin on McCann Road, we removed and reframed walls, replaced subflooring, and otherwise stabilized walls and rafters for future electrical re-installation, insulation and sheetrock.
On the 3rd house, the Riverside Road House, we placed flooring, interior doors, framed archways and windows, and painted the interior walls. We left this house finished and ready for the family to move back in!
On the 4th house, Connie Greer’s House on Chestnut Mountain, we painted the interior.
On the 5th house, the Friendship Baptist Church House, our objective was to remove the interior surfaces of exteriors walls to allow them to be insulated and re-surfaced, remove ceilings in a back addition to the original house, take down an outbuilding to be removed by future teams, and remove piles from our work and work done previous to our arrival. We ran out of time before stripping the inside of the final exterior wall.
We accomplished a great deal of work for a small team in 4 working days, spoke with some of the home owners, worshipped every morning through Biblical devotional from different members of the team, and enjoyed the cooking of our kitchen team. We also attended One Way Ministries’ Wednesday evening Bible study on what happened after the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We very much appreciated the coordination and hospitality of BGAV Impact Missions and One Way Ministries.
Here are some of the God Moments from the week:
  1. Hope Johnson’s God Thing had to do with food
    1. Grocery list for the first evening meal cut in half by food donated and/or left behind
  2. Shirley Craven had a few God Things, the most significant having to do with her grandsons
    1. She noted that her grandsons worked so hard
      1. I highlighted the pictures of her and Greg Craven mentoring in the slide presentation
    2. She and Greg were able to work together another week without getting a divorce. (That’s definitely a God Thing!)
    3. She further noted that her family enjoyed the laughter and ice cream runs that her family really needed since losing Dale
  3. Penny Decker’s God Things revolved around the little details where God just shows up
    1. Blue painter’s tape – used in a wad to pull coffee filters apart
    2. Penny also gave a devotional on Thursday, Yom HaShoah (International Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust), a week before Israel’s Independence Day Commemoration
    3. She related the contrast to what the victims of this storm are going through, with God providing for them to go back home after the suffering
  4. Joe Johnson’s God Things
    1. Saw a mother bear with 3 cubs on the way back to the church from work one evening
    2. The hilarious time the paint crew, which was him and the three from Fort Trial Baptist Church
  5. Butch Meredith’s God Thing – the Friendship Baptist Church House
    1. One lady’s house was completely destroyed
      1. BGAV-Impact Missions does not buy houses for people who have lost them
      2. He had a chance encounter with a deacon from Friendship BC about this
      3. Unbeknownst to either of them, another BGAV leader had a chance encounter with another deacon of the Friendship BC about the same lady’s loss
      4. At a deacon’s meeting, both deacons came up with the possibility of selling a house next to the church, if that might help
      5. They contacted Butch, who happened to be talking with a partner organization who decided that they could buy the house and deed it to this lady
      6. BGAV-Impact Missions then could bring that house up to livable for her.
    2. Several commented on the Dairy King as being a God Thing after a hard day’s work