Michelle Worley-Hurt has been to a lot of places over the last eight years, to put it mildly.
Worley-Hurt began volunteering for Samaritan’s Purse in 2013, which has taken her to the Bahamas, Ethiopia and even to New York last spring at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic there.
“It’s amazing and it is a Christian organization,” Worley-Hurt said. “I’m on call and I’m paid when I go, but it’s still amazing to me that I am being paid to love on people and to get to talk about Jesus. It’s just amazing. I’m gone several months total out of the year, but I usually don’t go for more than five weeks at a time.”
Worley-Hurt was inspired to volunteer for Samaritan’s Purse after the death of her daughter, Rayni Worley, in November 2012
“She and I had always packed Operation Christmas shoeboxes which is another program of Samaritan’s Purse,” Worley-Hurt said. “So we knew about Samaritan’s Purse only through those shoeboxes. Also, we had traveled to California for a medical conference (in 2011) and a tornado hit (Joplin) while we were in California. So when we traveled back home, we witnessed the devastation in Joplin and it really touched her heart.”
A few months after her daughter’s death, Worley-Hurt “felt like the Lord was saying ‘You got to go, you got to serve, you got to do.’ I had no idea what that looked like, but I got online looking for mission opportunities and mission work.”
She found that Samaritan’s Purse was responding in Joplin, Missouri.
“So immediately I was like ‘my daughter knew about this, this touched her heart and this is where I’m going’ — and that’s where I got started,” Worley-Hurt said. “Then it was just kind of (like) they do so much stuff and everything they do just touched my heart, so I just wanted to get more involved and I just kept doing more and more and more.”
Worley-Hurt started volunteering with Samaritan’s Purse’s North American ministries in 2013, where they do rebuilding and respond to storms. She did that until 2015, when she became part of the organization’s site leadership team, which is still a volunteer position with North American ministries.
In 2018, Worley-Hurt went on staff with Samaritan’s Purse for a rebuild project after Hurricane Harvey as a caseworker in Rockport, Texas.
“I got to tell people that we were going to build their homes for free,” Worley-Hurt said. “It was an amazing thing that I constantly was in awe that I was being paid for.”
After desiring to spend more time with her husband, Chester Hurt, Worley-Hurt shifted to an on-call position for Samaritan’s Purse’s disaster assistance relief team, which is international. She was in Ethiopia earlier this year responding to the humanitarian crisis there and she also has traveled to the Bahamas to help with hurricane relief there.
Worley-Hurt traveled to New York last spring when the city and the state were in the grips of the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Before I went, I wasn’t sure what I thought of COVID,” Worley-Hurt said. “We didn’t have really any cases in Butler County that I knew of, so it wasn’t something that was affecting me personally.
“So when I went, I had never been to New York, so I don’t know what it’s like when COVID’s not there — but when COVID was there, there was no traffic, nothing was going on.”
She was there for five weeks.
“Just to be a part of something that’s going to be history, definitely COVID became real for me at that point,” she said. “The hospitals were overflowing, so a Samaritan’s Purse (field) hospital was set up. People passed away, sadly. ... I do finance (for Samaritan’s Purse) so that’s different, but nurses and doctors were all sacrificing their time to go and to put themselves in harm’s way.”
Having been to so many places, Worley-Hurt has a hard time deciding which one stands out the most.
“It’s probably going to always be the most recent I’ve been to because my heart is still fresh with it,” Worley-Hurt said. “I mean Joplin definitely was significant because so many people have passed away and because it was close.”
Worley-Hurt went there about twice a month and for a week at a time.
“I got connected with the families and that devastation — people losing people, that was significant,” she said. “And then, of course, the rebuild in Rockport, which at the end was amazing because I was part of being able to say ‘Hey, we’re going to rebuild your house for free.’”
When she was in the Bahamas, Worley-Hurt was in a location that was utterly devastated — no electricity, no running water.
“To watch the people, they still had a lot of hope,” Worley-Hurt said. “There wasn’t a lot of crime when there could have been. That was pretty neat to see.
“Then most recently in Ethiopia, that is an extremely sad situation — people dying, people not being able to be in contact with their families, not knowing what’s going on, the government closing down phones and electricity. That was really significant (to me).”