Grenada Family Network Special Report – A Testimony from Petite Martinique

Unmoved

By Shelbe Cato Macias

“Just give me five more minutes, Lord – only five!” I whispered frantically to the Lord in the semi-dark kitchen as I struggled to complete two large pots of food. If you know what school kitchens look like, then you know these mini pools, called school pots, are not easy to handle. Yet my Heavenly Father inspired me to cook and fill as many as I could beforehand. It was now just a little past 8:30 in the morning and Hurricane Beryl was evidently settling into her new abode – the tiny Caribbean island of Petite Martinique.

Beryl’s dramatic entrance was forecasted to occur around midday, but clearly she wanted to truly make a Big Bang! As the wooden windows rattled aggressively and the wind picked up speed, I hustled on to finish the tomato sauce while trying to simultaneously clean up the messes I was making. The assigned NaDMA (National Disaster Management Agency) manager clearly thought I was crazy.

“Are you close to finishing?” “Yes! Almost done!”

Being a first time (unprepared) cook for a storm shelter of people with a contrary diet to mine, wasn’t as hard as the expectation to also be a nurse attending to wounds & ailments, serving food, collecting garbage, managing flashlights, and aiding in any area my husband and I were called upon.

I, along with my husband and two year old daughter had recently arrived on Petite Martinique just four days before the hurricane watch and confirmed warning came that a Category 4 hurricane was heading directly for us! Our small ministry, Ebenezer (formed in China 2020), was scheduled in Petite Martinique for the month of July to run our “Sola Scriptura” literacy program, in preparation for a Spelling Bee challenge at the end of the month – all founded on the Word of God.

I wasn’t frightened nor bothered at first since I was young when I experienced my first Category 4 hurricane, Ivan in 2004 back on the mainland of Grenada. However, it didn’t take hurricane Beryl long to show me that I should never rely on past experiences to judge present occurrences, especially when staying on a tiny island near the sea with nothing to break the wind speed or even a safe concrete house. The government storm shelter that was chosen was even closer to the sea than the house where we were temporarily staying for the July summer program. I was reluctant to leave the house till my Director instructed that we must and that it would be safer to stay in the storm shelter. The Lord also knew what He was about to permit to occur, and if we had stayed in the house, I wouldn’t be alive to write this testimony! We would have been minced!

“I’m done!” I exclaimed, as I raced back to the main hall where everyone was sitting anxiously listening to the deafening sounds of hurricane Beryl. The kitchen I had just left was detached from the school building and the main hall, where the shelter mainly functioned. It was fitted perfectly between toilets and shower rooms, and the second part of the building which housed class rooms and offices, so we were only blasted with wind when it changed directions horizontally and funneled between the two buildings.

The beginning of Beryl was filled with sounds of shattering windows, crumpled metal and galvanized roof panels ripping, tossing, and running like tumbleweeds in the ferocious gale. My husband had the courage to look through some wooden shutters that couldn’t be closed in order to record some of the horror with his phone. I recently was gifted with a phone from our beloved friends who run the GFN (Grenada Family Network) radio station back on mainland.

One of the first of many miracles was that a rough looking fisherman in the shelter was playing GFN radio all night and into the morning before the wind driven water sadly put an end to his heavenly consolation by getting his radio wet! No one knew the signal of 91.3 FM could reach that far. Meanwhile back on the mainland, our friends were praying that the radio station would stay on as long as possible and that someone in the midst of the storm would be comforted by it.

As the storm intensified, water began coming through from underneath all the doors except one, at a speed that our hands and brooms were not able to keep up with. We asked for sandbags but it became quite clear that NaDMA did not prepare as they should have for this boisterous Beryl who seemed even more angry that she wasn’t able to smash any of the school’s metal shutters or doors. So to suffice, she started sending both sea and rain water underneath the doors.

We checked our two year old daughter, who at this point, was left under a blanket and hoodie on a folding cot against a wall, where we presumed water would not spray her with the force of the wind.  As both my husband and I soon realized, we were the only ones hard at work to keep things safe, dry, or out of possible danger. It became obvious that the Lord God of the winds and waves brought us to Petite Martinique just for this! He brought us for “such a time as this” to run the shelter with a selfless love that He knew the political, racial, and religious division on the island would have prevented many of the desperate people staying in the shelter from having the slightest care to do anything kind for each other!

Another hurricane of abandonment and motherly guilt ravaged my heart and was more traumatic than Beryl’s unmerciful hand of destruction. I had to leave my daughter unattended with high fever during the entire storm. The coldest rainstorm I had ever gone through was the fact that this terrible crisis wasn’t able to motivate nine able-bodied men, sheltering with us, to lend a finger to help keep other people from harm. My three years of racial oppression in China, while engaged in the undercover work of evangelism, couldn’t compare to the inhumane mindset before us.

At that point I began to pour out my frustrated heart to God as I carefully slid, bare feet, against the slippery tiles to check the women’s area just to know how they were doing. That is when I discovered an 82 year old widow, left in the corner of one classroom on a mattress already sucking up the waters that were seeping through the building. My heart fell immediately! How was she not reported present upon arrival? Did the NaDMA manager forget she was there? Who are her relatives? She was clearly under-dressed and in pain as I grabbed my flashlight to get a look at her face! (Though hurricane Beryl came during the day, her immense size cast a shadow that made one believe it was already evening!)

I began conversing with the woman and found out she had distant relatives in the shelter too. I then removed her sheets only to behold her largely swollen knees! After she explained her pain, I hurried to get a tiny container of turmeric paste that was made as a natural remedy for pain relief. I was so happy the Lord impressed my Director to urge me to carry the bags of natural remedies. They were used to help more people than just my dear, new grandmother.

“What is your name?” “Joan. Joan Bethel”, she softly replied as I rubbed her swollen knees with the turmeric paste.

Bethel! Isn’t that where Jacob wrestled with Jesus Christ for his blessing?, I thought to myself. Well, Joan Bethel became precisely that to me! I ran back to ask one of her relatives, a retired captain, to please help me carry his elderly cousin to higher ground, the school’s wooden stage where most of the men were already sitting. “Let someone else help you”, were the words that shattered my heart.

I slid dejectedly back to where she was. Grabbing garbage bags to cover her belongings with the hope to keep them dry, I suddenly heard a teenage girl in the classroom shout “LOOK!”, before grabbing her things and fleeing out of the room with the only other lady in the shelter. The wooden roof truss holding the ceiling had begun lifting up and ripping out of the concrete wall above us. The fierce howling wind of Beryl was doing it’s destructive work bringing sudden overwhelming fear! Since my heart already left, the slot where my heart once was began to cave in further like acid on one’s skin.

Immediately I began to pray out loud while moving faster to finish bagging mommy Bethel’s belongings.

“You said you’re not a God of partiality…. I beg of you…. You sent angels to Sodom to pull Lot out of destruction! WHERE ARE MY ANGELS NOW? Please I beg of you! You can’t leave me here to be destroyed with this old woman alone!”

This prayer went on with me desperately asking God for help as no one came to help carry mommy Bethel to a safe area. At the word “Amen”, the roof truss and ceiling returned precisely into the space where it was being torn from the concrete and stayed there securely through the rest of the storm!

Just then a person outside in the storm was heard repeatedly bawling, “Open the door! Open the door!” While the shelter manager stood with his hands folded, another fisherman dashed to one of the doors where the wind was less aggressive to let him in. Skinny, with long hair came a Samson – a man from St. Vincent, with bulging eyes as though he had seen his life flash before him. His shin was bloody, grazed by galvanized sheet metal after his house blew away with him in it, according to his own words.

A few minutes later three more young fishermen came in, from St. Vincent & Grenada, with faces pale from their daring journey through the storm to the shelter. They seemed to all be friends. They were wet, cold, but absolutely more importantly, they were my unlikely “angels”, with crude fisherman language, whom God used to answer my emergency prayer!

After calming themselves from their traumatic experience, receiving food from the pot which the Lord impressed me to fill earlier, and which miraculously, was kept warm until the last of it was gobbled up, the three young men immediately went to work. Sweeping, mopping, moving furniture, and bolting doors – they were fueled and employed with unasked for and unexplained roles as though they truly had to be there and were sent to do their assigned tasks! That is when my heart began to calm down as God continued to show us that He was very much present at the shelter AND active too! The young men helped move mommy Bethel to the stage, along with wet mattresses which were heavier than discouragement could ever weigh!

Once all was in place, we all just sat to wait out the storm. The eye passed over and it was my first experience literally seeing the eye of a hurricane pass over, from utter terror, to a sudden calm and slightly sunny skies. Most of the smokers and drinkers rushed outside to smoke or drink which sparked a bit of internal tension, but that is where the Lord placed His lens over my eyes to look deeper – beyond their behavior – to see scared souls who are crying from both fear and loss all at once within themselves. Those who have Christ Jesus, the Lamb slain from the foundation of this world, can rely and rest on Him for strength and consolation, but these men didn’t have Him who is the only permanent solution to the fear of death, and thus resorted to their alcohol and nicotine to calm their anxieties. My heart suddenly pitied them as they sped back into the shelter for Beryl’s finale!

The second impact was brutal and at one point we all wondered whether the doors will finally give way or the shutters will blast out like the buildings around us. Thankfully the Lord made clear our door posts were soaked in His saving blood and held by His righteous right hand!

Voices and a crowd of people in the street declared that it was now safe to exit the shelter to see the aftermath. It was about 3 pm when people could finally step outside. I didn’t go outside, but took my ukulele, with our daughter now awake, and began singing “It is well with my soul”. As I sang, person after person burst through the shelter only to give bad news – almost in a tone of rejoicing – of whose house still stood and whose house fell. More than 95% of the island was flattened. There was barely a distinction between wooden houses and concrete as they received almost equal beating from Beryl! As these messengers of doom cast their depressing spells over us, I attended to mommy Bethel, who at this point was wailing over the loss of things rather than rejoicing that God had spared her life.

My husband received a raincoat and immediately went out to see what had become of both the house and SDA church. I didn’t have the energy to even think of it, although we had already heard from people who seemed happy to report that our place got beaten down as fine flour. Why? Why didn’t God spare anything? As Job, we could only say, “…the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” Job 1:21

The night passed slowly as we slept on damp mattresses laid on tables to get above the dirty wet floor. The next morning I went to see the destruction for myself and my soul echoed a sense of emptiness pervading the island as I stood in front a half standing bathroom wall over looking the sea. I couldn’t process anything as I was still in survival mode from the busyness of shelter duties.

 

I walked over the debris and to my astonishment there was a barrel still standing with the concrete slab my husband had placed over it before the storm. The slab was extremely old, but it covered incomprehensible preciousness – the Bible study collection!

Oh, my soul couldn’t believe it! Houses and churches, shops and restaurants, yachts and guest houses were all blown down while this barrel of Holy Bible studies remained unmoved, dry, and still exactly as they were rested inside the barrel!

No words have yet been created in the English language to describe the great awe as we stood before it!!! This was where our hope rekindled that truly all was not lost!

The physical pillars of the church may have been uprooted and thrown onto the seashore…. but the Word of God remained UNMOVED!!!

 

Forsaking some of our things, we carried what we could with us back to mainland on a speedboat with young men from Tobago who journeyed all the way from Trinidad to drop relief supplies! With a prayer in our heart we took the risk to ride down in the small boat, with our daughter, back to the mainland safely under the blood and protection of Jesus. As we said goodbye to the kind “angels” who gave us the free ride back, my husband pointed out something painted on the front bulkhead of the boat – Psalm 34:7.

“The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.”

It is there that my faith “has found a resting place”, where, though it may be shaken by a mighty wind, it will remain unmoved!

 

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Shelbe Cato Macias writes from Concord, Grenada.
She is married to Jorge and is a homemaker and
mother to 2 year old daughter Mercy.