The Spirit of Nashville
Five days after tornadoes tore through Middle Tennessee, I wrote down what I had watched happen in one Nashville neighborhood and what God was doing in me while we served there.
I went out expecting to help people after a disaster. I came home realizing God was waking something up in me too.
This week a terrible string of tornadoes tore through Middle Tennessee. Nashville was hit hard, along with several surrounding communities.
Twenty-five people lost their lives. Many others were injured, and hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed.
The morning after the tornadoes, I texted a friend and asked if he wanted to go with me into one of the affected areas.
I knew people who had lost everything. I figured we could stop at the store, pick up some essentials, find somebody who needed help, and serve for the day.
I didn't know that one day would turn into the rest of the week.
This is the story of what I saw, what God did in Nashville, and what He did in my heart that week.
We thought we were going for a day.
I went with a former student who had become an intern and a great friend in Christ. He ended up helping me every single day.
I made a quick video that day partly to recap what we were seeing and partly because I wanted people to see the kind of young man he was becoming as he followed Jesus.
Something changed.
I hadn't planned on going back every day.
But by the second day, something had gotten hold of me.
We kept meeting people who wanted to help. As we worked, more workers kept showing up.
That day we helped transform one woman's entire home.
At a moment when everyone was beginning to talk about the coronavirus, I remember thinking that the love I was seeing spread through Nashville felt even more contagious.
Russell Street became personal.
We began helping people on Russell Street between 17th and 19th Street.
One woman we met had a home that had been declared uninhabitable. Both sides of the house were gone, and her husband was in Europe when the tornado hit.
She was incredibly kind to us while we tried to help her with whatever she needed. We helped some of her neighbors too, and relationships began forming.
We were hearing that other parts of Nashville needed even more help, especially North Nashville.
But I had begun feeling deeply connected to this particular community. I wanted to keep serving the people we had already met.
At some point they stopped being people in a disaster area and started becoming people we knew.
Then the students came.
Our students had been begging me all week to let them come help.
On day four, I finally got approval to bring them into the affected area.
I took them back to the same neighborhood and let them join the work.
My own kids were with me too since my wife was away on a retreat.
There is something different about telling teenagers that Christians serve people and giving them a chance to stand in the middle of a devastated neighborhood and do it.
Nashville showed up.
By Saturday, I was completely overwhelmed emotionally.
Everywhere I looked there were volunteers.
People were carrying debris, cleaning yards, moving belongings, feeding people and doing whatever needed to be done.
The neighborhood seemed to transform in a single day.
I remember hearing about an out-of-state contractor who brought a large crew into Nashville for cleanup work, only to discover that every job they had been hired to do had already been completed by volunteers.
He sent his crew home.
We reconnected with the woman we had met on Russell Street on day three and helped move every possession she had left from her damaged home into storage.
The Spirit in Nashville was the Spirit of God. It was the spirit of love.
I was proud of the people who served beside me all week.
But something else happened too.
God showed me that I had been living in sleep mode.
This week was crisis mode. I don't expect to stay this way forever, but I don't want to fall back into any kind of spiritual sleep.
– Jon, March 2020
Some stories don't need to be rewritten.
Reading this again in 2026, what stands out to me isn't anything particularly impressive that I did.
It's how quickly ordinary people became the hands and feet of Jesus when their neighbors needed them.
I watched adults serve. I watched young people serve. I watched people who didn't know each other work beside one another because there was something more important in front of them than themselves.
And six years later, the sentence I don't want to lose is still the same one:
I don't want to fall back into spiritual sleep.
I don't want it to take a tornado, a crisis or someone else's tragedy to wake me up to the people God has already placed around me.
JON ALLEN · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2026