March 2016 – In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina blasted the gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama with the fury of 100-400 mph winds that stretched across more than 400 miles, killing nearly 2,000 and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless or displaced.

While the national media’s focus fell on levee breaches that led to vast flooding in New Orleans, Steve Tybor and his father were moved to help the people on the Mississippi gulf coast.

“I’m the guy nobody wants to give a hammer to,” Tybor, cofounder and president of Eight Days of Hope, told AFA Journal. “But it made sense that we go down there and do something.”

They recruited a few friends and decided to ask American Family Radio to run a local spot with hopes of attracting a few volunteers. But Tybor’s passion was infectious. AFR went beyond local promotion and aired information about the ministry opportunity nationally. And a website was soon created to manage the flood of 684 volunteers who traveled to the Mississippi coast and rebuilt 84 homes.

In another instance, a major ministry leader invited Tybor to his office. “He asked me about the financial accountability we had put in place and said he wanted to donate $100,” recalled Tybor. As he walked to the parking lot with envelope in hand, he felt both excited and grateful for the doors God was opening. This donation would bump their total fundraising efforts up to $1,500.

“Then I opened the envelope,” he said. “It was a check for $100,000. At that moment, I realized God had something majestic in store – not for us, but for these people.”

Not done yet
As work came to a close and volunteers drove away, Tybor looked out the window and saw hundreds of homes and businesses left damaged and destroyed. “We saw boats in trees and dolls on the side of the road that had been in a little girl’s bedroom just a month earlier,” he explained. “It broke my heart, and I felt like God wanted us to go back. And so we decided to form a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and the ministry of Eight Days of Hope was launched.”

In 2006, 8DOH made three more trips to rebuild Bay St. Louis. The 8DOH ministry has completed eight missions and rebuilt a total of 1,700 homes in Louisiana, Iowa, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Mississippi.

The most recent outreach was in Tupelo, Mississippi, after an F3 tornado ripped straight through the ministry’s home city on April 28, 2014. Over 3,000 volunteers arrived from 37 states to provide 151,000 hours of volunteer labor. And 235 homes were rebuilt.

Hope teaches
It was during the Tupelo mission that something shifted, both for the ministry of 8DOH and for Chris Chiles, an on-site volunteer in Tupelo, who was on his fifth consecutive mission with the ministry.

Chiles had made his living building houses. After he was saved, he began participating in foreign mission trips as his busy work schedule would allow.

“And then I heard about this thing called Eight Days of Hope,” he told AFA Journal. In 2010, he traveled from his Virginia home to Nashville, Tennessee, where he took on an assignment installing sheetrock in a home damaged by the city’s torrential floods.

“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” he explained. He had done that type of work countless times. But when he moved beyond the dust and nails, and he met the homeowner and learned of his struggles, Chiles began to see things through a different lens.

“The Lord allowed me to see that burden lifted from this man and his family,” Chiles recalled. The following year, Chiles arrived in tornado ravaged Smithville, Mississippi, where 8DOH leaders assigned him the job of framing up and roofing a house that had been burned to the ground – an impossible mission with the small, inexperienced crew he had brought along from his home church.

“I had the youth group, a couple of ladies from the choir, and two guys who didn’t know anything about construction,” he explained. “But we got out there, and in a day and a half, I called and told the leaders, ‘I’m done. I don’t know how [we did it] – other than the Lord showed up.’” They had Chiles and his little crew continue working on the house.

“The lady that led our choir at the church is a Southern Belle who had never done any physical labor,” Chiles said with a chuckle. “I showed her how to put two pieces of siding on. She and two other ladies put every piece of siding on that man’s house. The electrical, plumbing, heating, air, insulation, drywall, vinyl siding, roof, and two covered porches were constructed, and on the eighth day, the owner moved in.”

Throughout those eight days, Chiles had been puzzled by the homeowner’s lack of emotion. Then Chiles learned the tough old farmer had lost his wife of over 40 years just three weeks before the tornado. A week later, the home the couple had shared was destroyed by fire. He then moved in with his son, whose house was destroyed by the tornado within days. He confided in Chiles that he had lost all hope.

“But look over there,” he said with welling tears as he pointed to his new home.

Chiles knew he had experienced a miracle in those eight days in Smithville, Mississippi, and he knew that God had opened the door for him to show and tell that weary man about God’s great love for him.

A reconstructed life
“The Lord started working on me on the bus ride home,” said Chiles. “He said, ‘This is what I have created you for.’”

He knew that meant he would need to leave his career, but he had no idea how such a commitment was possible. “I made a list of reasons I couldn’t quit,” he explained, “and one of them was finances. So, I just started praying. I got home that same day, and my wife was standing on the front porch smiling from ear to ear.” Her employer had just given her a 25% increase in pay.

In the three years since Chiles left his construction career, he and his family have walked in God’s supernatural provision. “We never missed [paying] a bill – never missed a meal,” he said.

While Chiles volunteered in Tupelo, Tybor asked him to head up a new rapid response arm of the 8DOH ministry – a salaried position. The couple sold their Virginia home in eight days, and a church near Tupelo offered his family a parsonage to live in.

Hope reigns
In one short year, the ministry division known as Hope Reigns has completed eight rapid response missions in areas where people were affected by ice and snow storms, floods, and tornados. Nearly 700 volunteers from 27 states have joined the Hope Reigns initiative and gone to the rescue in New York, Mississippi, Tennessee, Illinois, Texas, South Carolina, and Oklahoma.

“And I can’t believe the Lord allows me to be a part of it,” said Chiles – an attitude shared by thousands of faithful 8DOH volunteers.

“It’s about God moving through a grassroots effort of people from different denominations, different backgrounds, being the hands and feet of His son Jesus,” said Tybor. “God brings the right people, both in leadership positions and as volunteers. He provides the resources, and we’re just the hands and feet of His son Jesus. This is about God – what God wants to do through you and me.”  

Above, Stinson clutches a cross carved from a tree that once grew in her front yard. Photo: Anne Reed

On December 23, 2015, a merciless tornado came roaring through the darkness and into Susie Stinson’s rural neighborhood outside Holly Springs, Mississippi. The ever-widening twister had already surged through a half-dozen counties and would claim the lives of 14 people before finally dissipating.

“I thought it was just a regular storm passing over,” 95-year-old Stinson told AFA Journal, “until I heard a noise that sounded like a train. I've been through a whole lot, but this was the worst.”

Hope Reigns, the rapid response crew from 8DOH, arrived within four days to patch Stinson’s roof and clear downed trees.

Photos (except where noted): Black Thumb Studio (blackthumbstudio.com)