Marinda Skeesick, a member of Bethel World Outreach ministries in Brentwood, Tennessee, is originally from the Appalachian Mountains. She doesn’t consider herself a hero, but to those who are still recovering from Hurricane Helene, she is.
She was led to go back home to Damascus, Virginia, along with several other places in East Tennessee, and Western North Carolina to help those affected by the flooding back in September.
“Our goal was to hit all three states and just to serve the people that are part of me. Being Appalachian its engrained in us to care for one another,” Skeesick said.
After hearing from friends and family affected by the damage, Skeesick said she couldn't just sit around and do nothing. “I knew that the people were going to need to have love. And Love is an action.”
(We invite you to listen to the conversation between Crystal Thornton and Marinda Skeesick in the podcast below.)
For Skeesick, it was more than just about taking physical items to those affected, but also taking the Lord’s love, and to be present for the Holy Spirit to lead where He needed her to go. As she prepared to go; food, supplies and more seemed to come pouring in from everywhere.
Skeesick runs an Appalachian farm school and says the farm school families began bringing what was needed. One friend even donated a trailer to haul everything in. She then went to a Thrifts Mart to get totes and other supplies, where another unexpected blessing happened.
“They looked at me like I had three heads carrying all these totes," she said.
Skeesick shared what she was doing with several people who asked. The final person she spoke with, unbeknownst to her, turned out to be the store manager, who told the cashier to give her everything at half price.”
After packing up the supplies, Skeesick, along with her 6-year-old son, her 9-month-old son, and her husband, got into their Toyota 4-Runner, and a truck pulling a trailer filled with tools, chainsaws, hoes and rakes and set out.
“My husband works in construction and my daddy was a logger, so I’m used to tree work. So, we were ready for not just giving donations, but doing physical labor on the land and on these homes,” she says.
They started in east Tennessee around the Nolichucky River, near Jonesboro, in a little community called Bumpas Cove.
“There’s families that have been there for generation after generation. And so, we went up through there, and I let the Holy Spirit lead,” Skeesick said.
She told her husband to pull into an area where she saw a woman standing in a place where her home once stood. It had washed down about 100 yards from where it was. Skeesick asked the woman what she could pray with her for, and the woman asked if she and her husband could help her retrieve a cedar chest.
“It’s a very big Appalachian tradition," Skeesick said. "Cedar chests hold Afghans made by grannies and they’re important. They are solid pieces of wood furniture, passed down as hope chests in the mountains.”
When they went through the remains of the home, they were able to find it in one solid piece.
“We got in that rubble, and we pulled that thing out. And we found their family bible sitting there, and a sign about drinking coffee and praising Jesus! It was just an amazing thing to be able to pull those items out,” Skeesick said.
At every stop, no one wanted to take donations, but instead asked that the Skeesicks give it to their neighbors down the road who were worse off.
And “every one of them spoke about the goodness of God,” she said.
After leaving Jonesboro and the Nolichucky area, the Skeesicks came upon a farm that had lost all of its crops. They prayed for an elderly woman whose only desire was that her body be strong enough to help the people who had survived the storm.
They then traveled to the mountains in North Carolina, where they witnessed roads and railroad tracks that had fallen off into the river.
“What I have found, is that the areas that I was serving in, were places where people had told other people by word of mouth, and told other people how to get there, and local people cut the way in," Skeesick said.
She added, had she stayed at home just wondering about the people and not being there to share “Love in Action,” then the people she met along the way would not have been specifically covered by the prayers the Lord had her deliver to them.
Skeesick said she does not consider herself a hometown hero, but instead said it’s an honor for her to be the person who wraps her arms around someone during a prayer, and hear them say “Yes Lord,” throughout the prayer, then feel their bodies just fall into her arms with a release of everything they’ve experienced.
“And I’m just holding them up, just like I’d envision him comforting them,” she said.
Skeesick, who plans to go back and help in the next phase of rebuilding soon, quickly shuts down any talk of her being a hero to those she assists.
"No I’m not a hometown hero," she adamantly said. "Any of my people would have done the same."