United States (MNN) — Before Hurricane Milton struck Florida last Wednesday, several thousand first responders stood ready to move in. The hurricane came two weeks after Hurricane Helene killed more than 230 people across the southeastern U.S. Response and relief efforts continue as many people remain missing after Helene’s devastation.
(Aerial shot of Hurricane Milton still in the Gulf of Mexico courtesy of CSU/CIRA & NOAA via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.)
While Hurricane Milton was not as devastating as weather forecasters warned it could be, as of Friday, at least sixteen people are known to have lost their lives from the storm.
Ron Hutchcraft with Hutchcraft Ministries says, “Hope in those situations can be summed up in a single word, and that word is ‘rescue.’ It’s the first priority, not only of your first responders who are trained in it, but it becomes the first real response of neighbors and friends and people from all over the country that come pouring in.”
When lives are at stake, people drop everything. In the wake of Milton, nearly 1,200 people have been rescued, according to the office of the governor of Florida. You may have heard the stories from Helene of restaurant owners giving away meals, private helicopter pilots running rescue flights, people bringing medicine on foot over mountains, or churches becoming bases for relief work.
Hutchcraft sees these stories of heroism in heartbreak as a picture of the spiritual realities and responsibilities facing Christians today.
“If we realize what the Bible says about the spiritual condition of the people around us and of the 8 billion people on this planet, it’ll change our priorities, just like it does after a hurricane,” he says.
He points to Proverbs 24:11 which says “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter,” as well as Jude 23 which says “Save others by snatching them from the fire.”
(Photo of military personnel in Asheville, North Carolina after Helene courtesy of Bill McMannis via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
“Jesus’ mission statement [is] ‘the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost,’” Hutchcraft says, referring to Luke 19:10.
“Our only hope was the Rescuer who came from above, because we have a death sentence for our sin against God, which was paid by Christ on the cross. People need to know that, and we have that message.”
There are many causes and messages in the world, but only one message can change someone’s eternity.
“[That] cause is the rescue mission of Jesus, and the message is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a call to all of us with that picture [of hurricane rescue] in our mind, to be all about rescue, to be all about what our Master was about, not waiting for somebody else to do it,” Hutchcraft says.
“We have to risk to rescue them, but our fear shouldn’t be so much about what would happen to us if we try to rescue them: it should be about what will happen to them if we don’t.”
So, who in your life is in need of rescue?
Header photo: Captain Eric Gleason, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot assigned to the Marietta-based 78th Aviation Troop Command, Georgia Army National Guard, outlines an aerial survey plan with Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency (GEMA/HS) personnel and other local agencies in Augusta, Georgia to assess damage caused by Hurricane Helene in middle Georgia Sept. 28, 2024. Photo courtesy of Georgia National Guard via Wikimedia Commons.
