Witness Moment
Sharing Christ’s Love ‘Through Our Hands, Our Feet’
Lutheran Early Response Team volunteer Bryce Cramer uses skills learned in his former career to serve those affected by disasters.
Before he retired from full-time employment, Bryce Cramer spent 36 years working for a rural electric cooperative in Illinois. As part of that work, he led “right-of-way” crews — teams responsible for clearing brush and trimming trees along utility corridors — and served as the cooperative’s director of safety training.
It’s no wonder, then, that Cramer quickly became an asset to the Lutheran Early Response Team (LERT) program. One of Cramer’s first major LERT deployments was to the Florida Panhandle in 2018, following Hurricane Michael.
“It was the week after Thanksgiving,” Cramer recalls, “and three of us from Immanuel [Lutheran Church in Murphysboro, Ill.,] went down after church on Sunday.” There they met the Rev. Ed Brashier, then district disaster relief coordinator for the LCMS Southern District, who made Cramer a team leader and asked him to assist a particularly “crusty” hurricane victim.
That assignment — to resident Ricky Jay, who needed help but was not sure he wanted prayers — became a defining moment in Cramer’s now nearly 10-year involvement with LERT. He tells the story of how Jay, after watching volunteers clear the debris around his mobile home, came outside to compliment their work. The next day, Jay again expressed his appreciation, saying, “I can’t believe you guys do this.” This time, when invited by Cramer to join the LERT group in prayer, Jay responded, “I think I’d like that.”
A few weeks later in January 2019, while in Florida with his wife, Cramer participated in another LERT deployment and checked in on Jay, who told him he had been thinking about going to church. Later that year, Cramer heard from Brashier that Jay had died. A member of Brashier’s congregation, who had invited Jay to church a number of times and who visited him in the hospital shortly before he died, reported that Jay said, “I’m not the same guy I used to be.”
Cramer doesn’t know exactly what those words mean, but he is thankful for the opportunity he had to witness to the love of Christ, and he hopes the message took root. “We show people our Lord through our hands, our feet and … how we treat each other. … After that, we leave it up to the Holy Spirit.”
From Team Leader to Trainer
Today, Cramer serves as a LERT trainer, and Immanuel continues to be a congregational LERT hub. Between deployments — Cramer recently assisted in Charleston, Ill., after a tornado tore through town on June 19 — Immanuel’s LERT group stays busy serving congregation members and the larger community, doing everything from installing new smoke alarms for senior citizens to repairing loose porch railings, cleaning gutters and even building a wheelchair ramp. Why? Because, Cramer says, the church is called “to take care of our elderly, take care of our widows.” He feels blessed to be “one of the fortunate ones” who has had the opportunity to see the fruits of this work.
It’s that reward that keeps him involved with LERT almost full time. “[Sometimes I think] I’ve got to quit this one of these days,” he says. “[But] the Lord uses this as much for me as [for] anyone else.”
Cramer gives enormous credit to LCMS Disaster Response for the robust ministry it has established: “We are very fortunate with the leaders we’ve got there in St. Louis who had the foresight to say, ‘Hey, we can grow this thing.’”
Cramer is grateful for his wife who is always supportive, even when the work takes him away from home unexpectedly. In fact, she once told him, “The Lord has been preparing you for this your whole life. [Your secular job] was just preparatory.”
Maybe that’s why, when Cramer starts to feel restless, “She looks at me and says, ‘You need some chainsaw therapy.’”
Learn More
- Learn more about LCMS Disaster Response
- Make a gift to support the work of LCMS Disaster Response
Cheryl Magness
Managing editor of Reporter and staff writer for LCMS Communications.
