# What's In Your Cup: Nearly Two Years After Helene, the Church Showed Up │ BardsFM

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/bardsfm-428602/what-s-in-your-cup-nearly-two-years-after-helene-the-church-showed-up-bardsfm
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/bardsfm-428602/what-s-in-your-cup-nearly-two-years-after-helene-the-church-showed-up-bardsfm.md
Podcast: [BardsFM](https://stenobird.com/podcast/bardsfm-428602)
Published: 2026-08-09T23:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.bards.fm/e/whats-in-your-cup-nearly-two-years-after-helene-the-church-showed-up-%e2%94%82-bardsfm/
Audio file: https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/et8qyj89cg7is5vq/WIC_20260809.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3587

## Resource

Episode 4201 │ August 9, 2026 Two nonprofits repaired hundreds of homes in Western North Carolina. The federal government repaired two. That is not an exaggeration. WHAT THIS EPISODE COVERS Scott Kesterson and Don Cox check in six weeks ahead of the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene with a sobering ground report — 73,000 homes still identified as damaged across Western North Carolina, hundreds of families still living in unrepaired houses, a low-income housing grant that shut down for the first time in 20 years in hard-hit Avery County, and a permitting bottleneck now blocking volunteer labor even when the money and manpower exist. Against that backdrop, Scott and Don trace what actually worked: Samaritan's Purse explicitly refusing federal funding because compliance would slow their work, Baptist and Methodist relief teams still running nearly two years later, and Bald Guy Brew's own survival story — ten days of funding left, a single obedient phone call, and a community that rallied around the shop and has kept every employee working since. The episode closes on Don's account of a Bald Guy Brew Monday morning men's Bible study that has grown organically over that same span, a stranger's journaled prayer for community answered the same afternoon she walked into the shop, and the same Luke 18 persistent widow spirit — pray for all things, but do not waver — as the thread connecting personal faithfulness in small things to the recovery of an entire region the federal government has largely abandoned. KEY QUESTIONS ADDRESSED What does the two-nonprofits-versus-two-federal-repairs statistic actually reveal about the gap between government disaster response and church-led relief nearly two years after Hurricane Helene — and why did Samaritan's Purse deliberately ref…

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