A woman who lost nearly all her belongings due to Hurricane Helene is thanking the Evangelical Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse for gifting her with a new camper home and car.
Rev. Franklin Graham, CEO of the North Carolina-based charity and son of legendary evangelist Billy Graham, shared a video on his X account Friday featuring testimony from one of the beneficiaries of the group’s efforts to help North Carolina residents affected by Hurricane Helene. The storm ravaged western North Carolina last September.
At the beginning of the video, Sherri Hughes declared, “I don’t even know how I got so blessed.”
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“My son passed away five years ago. COVID hit right after. They shut the churches down and so by myself, I was having to deal with the death of a child,” she recalled.
Hughes said she began drinking “heavily” and continued for three years until Hurricane Helene caused her to lose nearly everything.
“When you think death is at your door, you just become human and I was like, ‘I don’t want to die.’ I opened the front door, and there’s nothing; you can see nothing but water, and my car was floating down the river. When I lost the car because I got it right after my son passed away, I felt like losing a part of [him] and me again,” she explained.
“I would stay at family members’, and then I was staying at the homeless shelter some … and then before I knew it, you all started showing up,” she said, referring to Samaritan’s Purse.
She thanked the charity for giving her a camper that she will “never have to move out of” and a “brand new car.”
Video footage shows an emotional Hughes hugging a Samaritan’s Purse volunteer after she received the car. Hughes credited the experience with helping her to regain an appreciation for God’s love.
“I just reminded myself, ‘Sherri, He sees you, and He doesn’t see your past, He only sees the blood. He sees me for who I am, not what the sin makes me feel like.'”
“I don’t know why He puts me through stuff, but God, look what He did,” she added.
“How can you not praise Him!” Watch as @SamaritansPurse distributed replacement vehicles to victims of Hurricane Helene like Sherri Hughes who had lost theirs in the storm. pic.twitter.com/xdtI84r3AY
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) May 2, 2025
Hughes broke out into song, reciting the lyrics to “Look What You’ve Done for Me” before asking, “How can you not praise Him?”
Hughes maintained that she is not alone. She thanked Samaritan’s Purse for enabling her to see “God’s people again.”
“I never doubted my salvation, but I did doubt that this world would ever be anything but horrible,” she proclaimed. She thanked Samaritan’s Purse for helping her to gain the ability to “breathe again” after the tragedies she experienced.
The video also featured comments from Samaritan’s Purse volunteer Leslie Klein, who said that she had lost everything but is “answering through the Church and through people who wanted her to know that she wasn’t alone.”
“It seems so big, but it’s so small in comparison to the no-strings-attached love that God has for us,” she said.
“Every time they get in their car, it’s a reminder that although the world works with ‘if something is too good to be true then it probably is,’ that’s not God.”
Klein said Hughes is one of eight Hurricane Helene victims the organization gave a car to on one particular day.
Making landfall as a Category 4 storm, Hurricane Helene left more than 100 people dead and left a trail of destruction in its path even after it was downgraded to a tropical storm that hit western North Carolina particularly hard.
In the storm’s immediate aftermath, Samaritan’s Purse deployed food, water and medical kits to the area.
In an interview with The Christian Post that took place immediately after the storm, Graham insisted: “We all are going to have storms in life, whether it’s this storm — or it could be a financial storm, it could be a health storm — but we have storms in life, and the Bible tells us that if we put our faith and trust in Christ, that not only will He get us through this life, He will take us all the way to Heaven to be with Him one day.”
“We’ll be safe and secure in His arms, for those that put their faith and trust in Him,” Graham continued. “That’s the hope we have. … I just want our team to be able to share God’s love with everyone we meet and everybody we help.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
