About

I keep ending up in the wreckage.

My name is Kevin Striegle, and I’m from West Michigan. For more than a decade I’ve kept finding myself in the places where things have fallen apart — and I’ve come to believe that isn’t an accident.

It started in the rubble of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. I went to New York for a week with a relief team, expecting to haul water and gut flooded houses — which I did. On the last day, in a Breezy Point neighborhood where a fire had taken more than a hundred homes, I climbed into the ashes of one to help a couple search for their family safe. I found a small wooden cross lying unburned in the debris, and the safe was right behind it. I’ve never been the same since. Here’s the whole story.

A few months later I left for the World Race — eleven months, thirteen countries, one squad of fifty-six. I served the poor and the hurting from Albania to India to the Philippines to South Africa, and I ran the logistics that kept us moving: visas and border crossings, buses and red-eye flights, lodging, food, and the paper trail of receipts back to the home office. My own mom and sister even flew out and served beside me in the Philippines. You can read the whole journey here.

So when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake tore through the southern Philippines this June, it didn’t land as a headline about a faraway place. It landed as somewhere I’d been, somewhere that already held a piece of my heart. I’m going back — to do the exact work I once did there.

I’m a Christian. I don’t have it all figured out, and I’ve spent long stretches being a pretty poor one. But “Here am I. Send me.” has turned out to be the truest sentence I know.

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