Sweet beignets and spicy jambalaya. Lively zydeco and smooth jazz. Pristine mansions and crumbling shotguns. The scents of rich creole cooking and putrid streets. New Orleans abounds with juxtaposition. Influenced by a hodgepodge of cultures from all over the world because of its port location at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans welcomes people from all backgrounds to experience its unique and eclectic personality.
I had never been to New Orleans when Coach Anderson recruited me to play soccer for Tulane University. Nestled in the beautiful garden district, Tulane attracts students from all over the world to study a few miles from the heart of the Big Easy. I still have no idea why it attracted me instantly. It’s a completely different environment from where I grew up in Northern Virginia 15 minutes outside Washington DC. Looking back now, I can say God sent me there, but at that time I didn’t have a relationship with God. Simply put, Tulane offered me the most athletic scholarship money. I verbally committed as my coach dropped me off at the airport, and a few months later I started pre-season with 24 other girls in the sultry summer of 2003.
Three soccer seasons, four Mardi Gras, three boyfriends, three hurricanes (the storm not the drink), and many many daiquiris and hand grenades later, I graduated with a bachelors degree in ecology and evolutionary biology. After Hurricane Katrina, they dropped the soccer team and I spent my senior year as a student athletic trainer for the Tulane football team, igniting my interest in the human body which lead me to earn my doctorate in physical therapy from Emory University in May 2010. As turbulent as my time in New Orleans was, two of the most important milestones in my life occurred here: I turned to God and I met my husband.
When Hurricane Katrina came through at the start of my junior year and wiped out the levees causing the city to flood, New Orleans died. Most of us fled ahead of the storm, sitting in hours upon hours of traffic trying to reach safety. Those who stayed were trapped for days and weeks in flooded homes or city provided shelters. When the waters receded the city felt like a third world country. Streets piled high with trash and muck, widespread looting, businesses closed, electricity downed, streetcars stagnant, citizens displaced all over the country, national guard deployed. The storm crushed the city and many wondered whether it could ever be rebuilt. Many wondered whether it was worth rebuilding.
Sitting at a cafe on Magazine street, shaded by a majestic overhanging oak tree, surrounded by music and conversation, drinking my chicory cafe au lait, I smile as I write this because the city now thrives. Only a few weeks after the waters receded, volunteers from all over the country flooded to New Orleans to begin the clean-up. When we students returned to Tulane in the spring of 2006, we gutted moldy houses, cleaned up debris, provided food, shelter and supplies to locals who had lost everything, and started rebuilding what nature had torn down. Locals and tourists alike restored it because they loved it. The city emerged like a phoenix from the ashes and became even more beautiful and vivacious than it was before.
It’s been almost 8 years now since I graduated from Tulane, but I still remember my 4 years in New Orleans as the most vibrant years of my life. Whether riding the streetcar downtown to walk down Bourbon street or shop in the open air French Market, going for a run in nearby Audubon Park, catching a concert at the House of Blues, downing charbroiled oysters at Acme Oyster House, wandering the above ground cemeteries in search of Marie Laveau the voodoo queen’s grave, perusing the boutiquey Magazine street shops, watching the street performers, local artists, and fortune tellers outside Jackson Square or just taking in the eclectic architecture all round the city, I still feel like there’s so much more to explore.
August 2015 marks the 10 year anniversary of that storm. New Orleans still has neighborhoods of vast wealth and vast poverty. Fetid smells still permeate the French Quarter competing with sweet and savory fragrances emitted from world famous restaurants. Voodoo shops sit next to churches and street artists continue to capture evocative cityscapes. For all the new structures and streets scrubbed clean, the city’s soul remains just as diverse and flawed as ever. I think it’s the city’s imperfection that makes it beautiful; it’s willingness to not timidly hide its shortcomings behind a flawless false facade, but display its battle scars proudly. It’s not ashamed to be exactly who it is, exactly how God created it, blemishes and all. It’s loved unconditionally, both beautiful and ugly.
But underneath what I see, why do I truly love New Orleans? Because it survives. It perseveres. It is resilient and powerful. No matter what it faces, it refuses to be held prisoner to the trials it weathers or let people’s expectations and limitations hold it back. Katrina swept away buildings and streets, but the culture remained and rebuilt because New Orleans was worth rebuilding. The storm crushed the body, but nothing could ever crush it’s God-given soul, and it’s the soul of New Orleans that makes it tough. It survives because it wants to. It survives because it has to. It survives because it is loved.
Spending the week before my next embryo transfer in New Orleans, while my husband plays in the Zurich Classic PGA tour event, allows me to reflect on how far I have come in the 12 years since I stepped on Tulane’s campus, a naive 17 year old. I’ve weathered over a decade of storms, none more difficult than infertility. It’s my own hurricane of swirling emotions battering against my God given soul, trying to crush me under the weight of its unrelenting uncertainty. The hormones and medical procedures attack my body, causing weight gain and sickness. Failure after failure rain down on my spirit, seeking to paralyze me with depression. My inner being became polluted with shame, guilt, and anger. I knew I couldn’t stay like that, didn’t want to stay like that, but how could I be rebuilt? Was I worth rebuilding?
Although the storm still rages around me, not knowing whether this next transfer, or any transfers for that matter, will work, God is teaching me how to persevere. He is teaching me that even though I am not perfectly made by the world’s standards, I don’t have to hide what I perceive as ugly about myself; I should wear my battle scars with pride. He created me exactly as I am for exactly the purpose He has in mind for me. We can all survive our storms, and we are all worth rebuilding because we are all loved by Him unconditionally. No one is too far gone or too unworthy to be rebuilt by Him. If New Orleans taught me anything, it taught me that I will make it through this because I want to. I will make it through this because I have to. I will make it through this because He loves me and He is doing the rebuilding.
James 1:2-4, James 1:12, Hebrews 10:36, Romans 5: 3-6, Revelation 2:10, 2 Timothy 2:12
Cedar N' Steel 