She Fed 50,000 Meals After the Flood Took Her Own Home

Real Church or Play Church? Sandy in McDowell County

Cleaned transcript. Speaker labels collapsed into a clear back-and-forth. Obvious transcription errors corrected (locations, names, common words). Filler removed. Section headings added.

Opening: The Beer Can in Church

Justin: When I was out front earlier, I was watching Sandy now, all these years later. A working girl walks by. There's no preaching. You just say, "How can I help you?"

Sandy: You got me in my feels, Justin. Sorry. America is in big trouble now. We've run everybody off from the house of God. We've made it so hard for them to sit down. It hasn't been long ago, a friend of mine was in church here locally, and a guy walked in with a can of beer in his shirt pocket. She scooted over and asked him to sit down beside her. She was raked over the coals for that. He should have been made to feel welcome, completely. No ins and outs. No nothing. The fact that he could come in and sit down beside her with a beer in his pocket. We've got to decide. Either we're going to be real church, or we're going to play church. And we do not have time for playing anymore.

Justin: Sandy, thanks for taking the time to sit down. I'm excited. We've spent a few days out here with you. It's been fun to watch. You hit the ground running yesterday. We got pulled in twelve different directions.

Sandy: Yeah, just about every day. Especially in the spring and summer months. We try to take January off, but it's not always very successful.

Life in McDowell County

Justin: For folks who've never been to McDowell County, paint a picture of the community. What's it like here?

Sandy: I'll start by saying these are the biggest hearts of people you'll ever meet. So much kindness and compassion. You won't break down beside the road and be left there long. It's not like city life. If you break down, somebody's going to stop and say, "We can get this going. Let's do it." Big hearts.

We're not up to date on the things of everyday city life. Things run at a slower pace here. You don't get in a hurry about anything. The lack of more technology here makes us simpler people. Maybe puts us a little behind. About twenty years behind on some things, maybe. We still don't have cell phone signal everywhere.

Justin: I noticed that driving through. Some spots it's 5G, great, and other spots it's flat line, usually not far from one another.

Sandy: They're right next door.

Justin: What's a misconception people have about Appalachia, McDowell County?

Sandy: I think the biggest misconception is thinking everybody here is a dumb hillbilly. I jokingly say this, but in all sincerity: the people here will make it through the zombie apocalypse when the rest of the world crashes. We're used to dealing with nothing. Dealing with the minimum of most things.

Sandy's Testimony

Justin: You're from here. You told me you were in North Carolina working. What did you walk away from, and what made you come home?

Sandy: The biggest thing is that I was never even the Easter-only Christian. We weren't even Christmas-Easter. Our parents threw us on a bus. Probably the Salvation Army or something similar. We went on a bus once a year for five days to VBS. That was the only introduction I ever had to Jesus.

When I met my husband, I was only 13. He was 19. That's just the way things were sometimes. He had a preaching daddy and a praying mama. I learned the concept of Jesus through them, which was very foreign to me. Very foreign. My mom had a family Bible, but I never opened it. We were like, "Don't touch that."

I went to their house for Christmas, and they actually had gifts for me. So strange to me. They showed me a lot of love that I wasn't familiar with. My mom had so many of us. She was tired of raising kids. She started young, and she didn't have a chance. She made horrible decisions for us most of the time. If you made those kinds of decisions for kids today, welfare would come and take them. But back then, life was normal. Everybody had a lot of kids because you needed workers. You thought about workers more than you thought about how you were going to feed and provide and keep them safe.

When I married my husband, a year or so later we moved away. We'd already had one baby. We had another the first year of marriage. So I had my first baby at 15. I had a hard childhood. Very hard. But it built me. I'm not ashamed of my story. I think other people need to know it because it brings reality to light. Life is hard sometimes.

He was losing his job. We weren't making any money. We decided to leave. We went to Statesville, North Carolina. We got jobs. And this pastor. He passed away last year. J.B. Parker Jr. One of my biggest heroes of the faith. He knocked on my door every Saturday.

My husband was raised in church. I was not. He didn't want anything to do with church. He was churched to death, in the good way and in some not-very-good ways. So he didn't want anything to do with the pastor. But I was very curious about what would make this man so persistent. What is wrong with him? So we finally went to church just so he would leave us alone.

Justin: You just wanted him to stop?

Sandy: I just wanted him to leave me alone. It's Saturday morning, for the Lord's sake. We worked all the time. We had little kids. We were exhausted. We didn't know what we were missing. So we went to church so he'd leave us alone. And I was fascinated with this Jesus guy. What in the world? What's up with Him? Why would you die for anybody?

I eventually understood enough. I was sitting at home one day. I don't remember why I wasn't at work, because I always worked. I just kept pondering these thoughts of a king, of a Savior. How could I get free from all my burdens? How hard my life had been. What were the keys? I just said, "Lord, if You're real, then maybe You can show me some things." As humble as I could. I didn't even know how to pray. I didn't know how I was supposed to address Him. I thought there had to be some formality. There isn't. There aren't any formalities. That's where we need to understand the gospel like little children. Just come.

Church, Legalism, and Coming to Christ on the Couch

Justin: When I was out front earlier and I'm watching you now, all these years later. A working girl walks by. No preaching. You just say, "How can I help you?" I think about contrasting different lives. The pastor coming to your door, knocking every Saturday, eventually your curiosity got the best of you, and you came to Jesus. Now I see that out front. You're not knocking on her front door, but you're knocking on the door of her heart. Why else would this woman love me randomly? It's a beautiful thing. So how did the path to ministry happen?

Sandy: The first year was extremely difficult. I had to convince my husband that this wasn't the Jesus he had been told about. His daddy was a preacher, a pastor. They had a parsonage. I went to church with them sometimes, and church lasted till midnight, then you had to be at school at 7 a.m. the next morning. Exhausted. Church all night. Church was very skewed.

I'll never forget telling my mother-in-law I had accepted Christ on my couch by myself. She said, "Oh, you can't do that. You have to do that at a church. At an altar." I said, "Really?" She said, "God didn't hear all that."

It had become so Pharisaic. We were so worried about legalism that we couldn't accept Christ just like He is. I really felt that. I thought it was real. Then I started exploring and realized it was extremely real. Probably the most real situation you can be in.

How does a never-exposed person come to the realization that God is so real? You're asking me to turn everything I've known over to a Man I've never seen. It's been a long walk. I'm still walking it. I'm going to mess it up today. I'll fix it later.

I just want people to see the Savior that I see is not the one we've put in a box and tried to dress up and make so legalistic. He is so simple.

What a Week of Ministry Looks Like

Justin: What does a week of your life look like now, on the other side of this?

Sandy: The food pantry has been around for almost ten years, so it kind of runs itself. It's a lot less stressful. I can pass a few things off. It's my baby. I'm very protective of her, making sure she's functioning the way she should.

I left a $47-an-hour job to beg people for pop-top raviolis. Crying. Thinking, what in the world am I doing here? I'm the least likely candidate. No authority, no power over anything. And yet God gives me so many blessings. I have to handle them with good stewardship.

Every day is filled with all kinds of stuff. The phone rings all day. A bus ticket for a girl to get here at midnight last night so she can get some help. Even if I waste every dime of that money and she doesn't get here, I was obedient. We have foster kids. We have court once a week. Doctor's appointments. The orthodontist is two hours away. The dentist is an hour away. Our week is filled with taking kids that we might have for two days or two years. And making sure women are stable in a safe place.

If they're going to work, if they're clean enough to work. It's not my job to determine what line of work they should be in. My job is to make sure they see Jesus in me. Then one day they might wake up and say, "That girl down there. She tried to give me some body wash just so I'd be clean." Whether to fulfill her flesh, get her next fix, or just crash so she'd have a place to sleep. I've got a girl down here who does anything just so a man will let her take a shower. That's real life. That's where we are today.

If we're going to sit in a pew and wait on people to come in, we are wasting our time. Don't get me wrong. Church is valuable and important. But if you're going to sit and wait on people to come to you, you are wasting precious time.

You know who the Great Commission is addressed to? I had a pastor, Keith, who told us all means all. Nobody in a wheelchair, nobody with one leg, nobody on a cane, nobody on a walker, nobody paralyzed from the waist down is exempt from carrying the gospel. If you've been chosen, there's always something for you. Even if it's writing letters to inmates. If you have extra money, send it to a missionary. There is a job for everybody. We are not exempt. If you open up Scripture and you're following the Word, you are never exempt from the commands.

February 15, 2025: The Flood

Justin: February 15th, you're driving home from a baby shower. Take me into that drive. What's going on in the middle of all of your normal "ministry life is crazy" rhythm. You're driving home on February 15th. What's going through your mind?

Sandy: We've had some hard seasons, but that day started as a tremendous day. We started home at 3 p.m. on what should have been a 50-minute drive. We got probably seven, eight miles. We were stopped by water everywhere. Mudslides. Water everywhere. I was in my Jeep. My kids were in front of me in their full-sized van. We had to ride separate that day for multiple reasons.

Somebody called us at the shower and said, "You need to get home. Your truck's almost in the creek." My son-in-law and my daughter came back inside. She said, "Mama, we got to go." I said, "What's wrong?" She said, "McDowell County is flooding."

We start home. We get down one road, can't get through, turn around, go back. Try another road. Can't get that way either. Water and rocks everywhere. It was just tremendous. We spent the next seven and a half hours trying to get home from a fifty-minute drive. We finally parked beside the road, and the water started receding. The rain had stopped.

We got within two miles of home. We made it to my daughter's house and were able to kick in the door and save the dogs. The cats had gone upstairs. We lost our chickens. Chickens are life here. So we got the dogs in the car. We had a couple bottles of water. We knew we'd be out for the night.

We ended up beside the road with about ten other vehicles, all trapped. After about seven hours we got past one area, got to the next, and there were a million cars in the road. I asked one man, "Are you okay?" He said, "My son was in that car right there, and we can't find him." His son's car was up against the mountainside, and the boy was nowhere to be found.

We had about five or six lives lost, maybe seven. Relatively small compared to what it could have been. We finally got home around 1 a.m. We were able to get into the house. No power. Our sewage system collapsed in the basement. There was almost five feet of water down there. When the power went out, the sump pump shut off. My daughter lost every single thing.

The next morning I drove through and came into Welch. I told them I had to check on my pantry. The pantry was destroyed. We lost everything. The guy from across the street had a restaurant. His restaurant wasn't hurt. He said, "Do you have any food we can cook? Everybody is hungry."

So we shoveled the mud out. We got the food out. We cooked it. We started feeding people. By the end, over 50,000 hot meals. We worked probably 18 to 20 hours that day trying to feed people, find blankets, all of it. The next day, people started coming in to help. For three months we did 16 to 18 hours every single day. Feeding and clothing people. Doing the best we could. People came from all over the world to help us.

After the Crisis: The Long Tail of Disaster

Justin: Just walk me through the resilience of yourself and the volunteers who, nobody would blame you for saying, "I need to take care of my own stuff." Nobody would second-guess that.

Sandy: Our daughter lost everything. She had seven kids. We finally got to the church where the sober living facility is. We didn't have any women in there because we were still putting in the sprinkler system the fire marshal had mandated. So they lived in the church. I went out every day to check on them when I had time.

Then we'd stay at the pantry. We coordinated with 911, the American Red Cross, everybody. It was just crazy. One of my babies looked at me and said, "Nanny, would you run to my house and get some of my toys? We don't have anything here to play with." They didn't even have a toy.

Justin: That's a moment where you're usually the helper. That's a moment where it would be appropriate to pause and let other people come in and serve. Yet you still chose to.

Sandy: There wasn't anybody to come in. I had no choice. I didn't know I was built like that. I'm tough. I'm resilient. I can handle it. But I didn't know I was built like that. I had no idea.

Justin: Walk me through afterwards. It's been a little over a year. How is the community now? Is there still stuff?

Sandy: We still have a lot of bridges out. We need foot bridges. We still have people not in their homes. We still have people walking across the creek to get into their homes. It's very real. The National Guard was here less than 30 days. There's nobody to help us. The people who are helping are people in churches. Churches who are trying to fill the gaps. Everybody leaves in the emergent part. After the emergent part is done, we're still picking up the pieces.

Justin: I think it's like that in all parts of life. We lost my dad in December. I've been fortunate to not have a whole lot of loss in my family, and this one was significant. The initial week, everybody shows up. Bakes the casserole. Shows up. Once the immediate crisis is over, then it's like you're just there.

Sandy: They've done their part and they're out. You can't expect anybody to stay long-term. They have their own lives. But there are people who held in for the hard part.

Stateside Missions and the Field at Home

Justin: How does that translate to churches that want to help?

Sandy: I can work them to death every day all day long. My list of needs is higher than I can keep up with. Every single day somebody asks me for something they need. It doesn't stop.

We fill the gaps where we can. We take emergent needs first. We're nothing special. I'm a nurse. I can't build a bridge. I can't plumb your house. You learn that you have to be very flexible. A lot of people show up on a mission trip and say, "Okay, we're going to do this on Monday, this on Tuesday." I can guarantee I'll throw a wrench in every one of your plans. You have to be flexible. You have to know it's not five-star accommodations. You have to be able to adapt.

A lot of people rush in like, "I'm going to save the poor pitiful people of Appalachia." No, you're not. Every time I've been on a trip. My first was Haiti. I went there to save those people because I thought I was some kind of hero, going to do the biggest job. Those people saved me. They made me realize my life is way better than I knew. Little is much when God's in it.

Justin: When we're stateside missionaries, when we're doing missions in our own hometown, the work doesn't stop. It's a different kind of work than going to the field. People don't think about the ongoing nature of stateside ministry. How do we reconcile that, or look at it as a church when we have such pressing needs in our own Jerusalem and Judea, versus the ends of the earth?

Sandy: Since I've done both, I feel I have the right to speak on both. World missions is wonderful. We have to carry the gospel everywhere. But here's the issue. We've looked over everything in America and taken all these things to other places. America is in big trouble now. We've let abortion get out of control. Let's call it what it is. Murder.

We've been the quiet Christian because we don't want to offend anybody. We've taken "Thou shalt not judge" completely out of context. You better judge everything. Right. I'm not saying judge with a hypocritical worldview. We don't have to do it that way.

Justin: And there's that contrast. You could have yelled at the working girl earlier, "How dare you live this life." We were talking about this last night in the kitchen. We don't want to judge inside the house of God, but we have no problem judging the outside of the house.

Sandy: Right. And where we should start is inside.

Justin: That's completely backwards from Scripture.

Sandy: It is. They want to take that part of the verse out. They like that part and they live on it. You need the A and the B. The before and the after.

Real Church or Play Church

Sandy: We've run everybody off from the house of God. We've made it so hard for them to sit down. A friend of mine was in church here locally, and a guy walked in with a beer can in his shirt pocket. She scooted over and asked him to sit down beside her. She was raked over the coals for that. He should have been made to feel welcome, completely. No ins and outs. No nothing. The fact that he could come in and sit down beside her with a beer in his pocket. We've got to decide. Either we're going to be real church, or we're going to play church. And we do not have time for playing anymore.

That time has passed. It passed centuries ago, but we keep doing it. Whatever makes us feel good. It is not about your comfort. It has absolutely nothing to do with your comfort. You better learn to get out of your comfort zone and do what Scripture says.

Justin: I hear resilience in your story. The salvation story. The conversion. Your testimony. Then realizing that obedience costs something. We've got to be willing to step up and serve our own community when we just lost everything ourselves.

The Recovery Center and the $58,000 Detour

Justin: Tell me about the recovery center. You got off the ground, then got hit with a detour. A pretty expensive detour. How does that slow the work down? In my mind, this is a place a city should give grace to a ministry filling so many gaps the localities and the state have missed. But you didn't get that. You had to fight that.

Sandy: We had women at the center. We were helping them. We were doing our best, straight off the ground. We didn't really know what we were doing, but we were learning a lot. The fire marshal said, "You can't have more than three people in here without a sprinkler system." We weren't covered under a grandfather clause because we were no longer a church. We had become a center, so we didn't fall under that grace period.

We needed a sprinkler system. A friend provided the down payment. We went through three different companies before we found the right one. When we found Greenbriar Sprinkler, Wayne and Tony were amazing. They said, "If nothing else, let us do it." We have not made a payment to them. I want to make that payment. They said, "We don't care. We don't care. We don't care." It was about $58,000. I care about $58,000. That's a lot of money. The Lord will provide.

We needed payroll. I have good credit, but I couldn't get a payroll line. I went to a buddy. I said, "I need some money." He said, "How much do you need?" He sent it. $45,000 to start payroll.

We were blowing through that pretty quick. We had a resident, but she wasn't ready for recovery. That happens more times than not in the recovery world. Out of 100, you might rehab two. It's very hard. You're spinning your wheels all day trying to convince people that recovery is what they need.

Justin: I love building projects so much because there's immediate resolve. You do the work, you're done, you see the finished product. When you're working with people in addiction, it's like the drywall project that never gets finished.

Sandy: There's always a hole when you patch it. If you're going to work in addiction recovery, you better be tough. You will never see the other side of that without a great battle. The first time you use, that's a choice. After that, it owns you. I was fortunate. It never owned me enough. I was able to beat it. Not everybody's fortunate. Somebody can use one time and they're done. They're ready. That's all they think about. Using again to escape whatever trauma, whatever life they've had.

But we are winning out there. We're winning. We're going to continue to win. Tomorrow we'll fall down, and we'll get up and win again. I refuse to give up.

That might be part of my problem. Maybe if I lay over a little bit sometimes, I'd have a little peace. But the Lord knows I'm up for a good time any time. He's not going to let me rest.

"I Want to Die in Service"

Sandy: I had a friend last year get killed loading a food truck. A car came around and killed her. She used to say, "I want to die in service." And she did. She's my hero. I want to die in service. I can't think of a better way to go.

I'm going to mess up a lot this week. I'm honored by all that grace God has to offer. That working girl out there deserves just as much grace as I got. I want her to know that if she needs some body wash later, after she's been busy today, she can come in here and get some body wash. Wherever that leads her next week is on her. All I can do is offer what I can offer right there.

Those people do not need our judgment. You keep that to yourself. If that's your goal, you don't have a place in this ministry.

This is a lifestyle that is so hard to understand. How you feed somebody time and time and time again, and they still say their food stamps are gone next month. They still need food, but they're still going to sell their food stamps. Instead of saying, "Why did you sell your food stamps?" Say that part if you want to. But you still need to give them food. It is not your job to provide judgment and fix whatever you think they've done wrong. Your job is to plant the seeds and let God provide the increase.

The Hardest Part

Justin: What's the hardest part of this work? The stuff people don't see.

Sandy: Watching people put their kids last. Worrying about what their kids are going to eat while they're worried about getting cigarettes or alcohol or dope. Whatever they're chasing. You're trying to fill a gap you will never fill with a dollar or with cans of food. You are not going to fill that gap.

We were created for worship. It takes forever to understand that.

Justin: I read somebody who wrote that addiction is basically a worship disorder.

Sandy: Oh, yeah. We are. We're worshiping the wrong thing. Anything at all that takes the place of your worship. Anything. I don't care what it is. Food. Your phone. Pornography. One of the hugest disasters in our country.

It all goes back to Adam and Eve. I can't even imagine how beautiful Eve must have been. How absolutely stunning she must have been. It all goes back to that fall. Every bit of it. Realizing every day that we're going to fall. We just have to keep going.

There's nothing we can ever do to attain grace and mercy on our own. That's a hard achievement. Working so hard to earn it is not going to earn it. You can't serve in ministry without some kind of sacrifice. You can't. And those sacrifices, they cost some things.

How to Get Involved

Justin: For people watching who are hearing the story and thinking, "I want to get involved," what does that look like?

Sandy: Your first step should always be coming to see it. You need to see it firsthand because the things we say are unbelievable. You have to see it.

People say, "How do you do so much? How do you do so much?" I don't know. I'm tired sometimes, but I have to. I'll fairly warn you. If you show me the least bit of interest, and you don't give me a firm no, I'm going to stop you. Because I need workers. The field here is so white on the harvest, you can't see the roots.

You'll never, ever, ever find a field more white on the harvest. I don't care where you go. I don't disagree with people going out of the country to do their work, if that's what you want to do. You go where God leads you. But I hope He leads you here. I need workers.

I need people who don't mind sweating out here and working in the rain. We unloaded 50,000 cans of beans individually, one by one, in the freezing cold rain. Does that make me better than anybody else? No. It makes me willing. If you make yourself available, God will use you. When you do your job well, you get to do somebody else's job too. That's true here.

What Keeps You Going

Justin: As we close out, I want to ask one final question. What's a question about this work you wish somebody would ask you, that nobody ever asks?

Sandy: I guess it would be, "How do you keep going? Don't you get discouraged all the time?" Yes. I get very discouraged. But I have so many people praying for me that I don't have time for discouragement. I won't get mad in front of people. I'll do it in private. I'll handle it with Jesus. Then I come back out and do it with a smile. The smile is not always real, but you have to do it.

You have to realize God's grace is sufficient. It's sufficient. It's hard. But I would not want to live my life any other way. After feeling God's glory, His mercy, His grace. It is all that He gives me, and I have nothing better to do than to serve.

Ten years ago I would never have said that. I would have said, "Let's go make some money. I've got things to do." Then I realized that doesn't really matter. I've had plenty of money and no money.

Justin: You've learned to be content.

Sandy: Content is a hard word. It's hard to be content when you need something really bad. Out of all the things I wish I never had to think about, it's utility bills here at the church and at the house. I wish we could just move past that. But I can tell you, they are always paid. Sometimes I don't know how. I'll get a random receipt in the mail saying somebody paid your gas bill. We never ask for a dime for those utilities. We post our account number and the address and say, "Would you mind paying that?" We don't care where it comes from.

The pressure a lot of ministry leaders are under. You've got to put the smile on. I spent five years preaching at times through texts I was wrestling with. Preaching the goodness of God, trying to encourage people on Easter, while secretly battling my own depression. The waves ahead. I don't think that's hypocritical. I think it's the tension of living it out.

Sandy: I think it's MercyMe that has that song. I can't remember the exact words. "Right now, I just can't." Today, okay. We're okay today. Tonight it might be, "I just can't." Go into your prayer closet and find whatever it is you need to find to fix it. Then get up. Stop whining. Get over it. Do it anyway. I don't care if you like it or not. Do it anyway. In the end, it's not about me. It's not about you. It's not about anybody. It's about His sovereign grace and mercy. Get on with it. I just need willing vessels, whatever that looks like.

A lot of people think they can't serve. "I don't have anything to offer." Yes, you do. You've got breath. You're good. Let's do it. I just need people to serve.

If you or someone you love is battling addiction, we are here for you. Get help today.

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