God used the 2005 hurricane, the Marsalises believe, to prepare them for what came next.
By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle
NEW ORLEANS — Even a decade and a half after the storm, Angela Marsalis still prefers to avoid the subject of Hurricane Katrina.
“I guess it feels like I’m still not ready to deal with it, even though I know all the good that came out of it,” she said this week. “I just try not to think about it because it’s really sad. I see it on TV, and I’ll change the channel because it’s just so dark.”
Her youngest son, Willie Marsalis, expresses similar feelings, particularly as Hurricane Laura takes aim at the Gulf Coast on the 15th anniversary of Katrina.
“I try to forget about it. It was traumatizing,” Willie said of Katrina. “Even when you try to forget about it, you hear of another storm coming.”
But Charles Marsalis — Angela’s husband and Willie’s father — has a different perspective.
As he sees it, God used Katrina to take a “nobody” — which is how he describes himself — and make him a somebody in the work of the Kingdom.
“It doesn’t bother me,” the husband and father said of the Katrina anniversary. “I look at it as, ‘This is what God started up front.’ … I think God had to allow us to go through something like that in order to prepare us for this work.”
This story appears in the online edition of The Christian Chronicle.
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