Robin Lowe’s inch, Theresa Safrit decided when the floods came and tragedy was everywhere and hope was in short supply, was like the Lord’s five loaves and two fishes that fed the multitudes.

You remember the loaves and fishes, of course.

And if you’re Theresa or her husband, the Rev. Don Safrit, who used to be pastor of Rowan County’s Christiana Lutheran Church and now shepherds a flock at Trinity Lutheran in Rocky Mount, you don’t have to look it up.

“Matthew 25,” Theresa says, but then she opens the Bible to make sure. “Yep, Matthew 25, verses 19 and 20.”

That’s what Robin’s inch was like when the rain fell and what that Ryder truck was like that Don drove back to Rocky Mount with furniture, appliances and clothes collected by the Bostian Heights Volunteer Fire Department for people who still need it in around Rocky Mount, Tarboro and Princeville.

It wasn’t the biggest truck possible. Or a tractor trailer full of furniture.

But it was enough to help some people who still need help more than six months after the devastation of the Hurricane Floyd floods last September, and it made Theresa think about Robin, a co-worker at Nash Community College.

Robin lived in Greenville, where power stations were being destroyed by the flood, when she heard a news commentator say one more inch of water would take out the last power station operating, and Greenville would have no power.

“So Robin wanted us to pray for one inch — at the college, at Trinity Lutheran, everybody we met,” Theresa says.

And her plea was always the same.

“Pray for one inch!” she begged.

And the next morning the news was good.

“The announcer said the water not only didn’t go up an inch. It went down a couple of inches, and I thought, ‘If we start with one family, it’ll be like the loaves and the fishes.’ ”

So that’s where they — and so many others — started. And it helped.

“Early on,” she says, “everybody was so overwhelmed. We had survivors’ guilt.”

The Safrits lost nothing.

“And I’d get in my car,” Theresa says, “and I’d have to take a deep breath and ask God, ‘Why did you save my car? Why did you save my house?’ and then I’d ask, ‘How can we possibly do it? How can we help?’ ”

So many people had lost so much.

But so many people — because they were filled with survivor’s guilt or the spirit of God — responded.

The Rev. George Terry, pastor of the Princeville’s historic African American St. Paul’s Baptist Church organized in 1865, understood about inches.

An inch, he said, is a cinch, but a yard is too hard.

“It was the kind of thing that helped everybody see, and that’s exactly what happened,” Theresa says. “If we are to recover from the Floyd experience, we must pray for an inch and then do it. If we accomplish an inch and those who want to help us, accomplish an inch, we will recover from this disaster.”

And all over the place, in all kinds of ways, people were starting with inches because that was all they could do.

The Safrits got to know George Terry from Princeville because Don helped organize the Twin Counties (that’s Edgecombe and Nash) Interfaith Recovery Initiative, which combined the efforts of 90 small churches to help.

“People are getting their houses finally dried out, rebuilt and refurnished,” he says, “but it’s just been a long, continuous effort for many months and will be for years yet to come. The recovery, the whole period of getting back to proper order, is just enormous.”

He learned that quickly after he left Christiana in 1991 to develop a mission church in Shallotte on the N.C. coast. The possibility of hurricanes there virtually required emergency training.

That training taught him the formula.

Every day of a disastrous event requires 10 days of emergency response, he says, shifting his voice into high gear, and 100 days of recovery.

The math isn’t hard.

Normally an event lasts one to two days. That means 20 to 30 days of emergency response, and 200 to 300 days — nearly a year — of recovery.

But in the Kinston area, Floyd’s flood waters didn’t go down for 48 days. That means 480 days of emergency response and 48,000 days — almost 10 years — of recovery.

Floyd didn’t last as long in Edgecombe County — a week in Rocky Mount, two weeks in Tarboro and more than two weeks in Princeville.

“We were at the beginning of the Tar River. The waters came quickly, were extremely devastating and left quickly. Normally the Tar River is 20 to 30 yards wide. It was a mile wide in Rocky Mount. The creeks you could step across got 10 to 14 feet deep, and gullies were 40 to 60 yards wide.

“... It sneaked up on everybody. We’re used to wind-driven storms. No one has ever experienced flood water in the inland rivers. That’s why there’s such disbelief. A wind-driven storm is normally a tree in the roof. You cut the tree off, patch the roof and get on with your life.”

But Dennis sat off the coast a week before Floyd and dumped a week of rain into the reservoirs and the rivers, and the ground was saturated when Floyd hit.

And everybody was overwhelmed.

Here in Rowan, people began to fill trucks and send help, and volunteer firefighters at Bostian Heights, where Don Safrit and his father, Earl, were charter members and oldest son, Lewis, is active now, did their part. Early on, they sent a U-Haul and pickup loaded with supplies.

But the questions kept coming.

“What can we do? What do they need?”

Don Safrit, long-time preacher, didn’t have trouble with questions like that.

“What does the Lord require of thee?” he’d ask, quoting the prophet Micah. “To do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.”

And he’d ask just as promptly: “What does that mean?

“Proper worship is not just simply to sing praises and have joyous assemblies. To do justice and have kindness and take care of those less fortunate is the whole ‘Who is my neighbor?’ question. Who has the need? If any of the least of these are hurting, then I am hurting.”

So, in answer to those questions, Darrell Efird, Bostian Heights’ assistant chief, was named project chairman, with the fire department and B&L Custom Cabinets as co-sponsors for the second collection. Rogers Park Baptist in Kannapolis and Shiloh United Church of Christ in Faith contributed. And so did individuals. Gifts showed up here and there in the fire department. A sofa, another sofa. Washing machines, dryers, a refrigerator, a microwave, bicycles, plastic bags and boxes of clothing and household supplies.

On Easter Sunday, after leading services in Rocky Mount, Rev. Safrit rushed off to Rowan to visit his and Theresa’s mothers, Alice Safrit and Ruby Martin, and their sons, Lewis and Greg, and their families — and load that truck and take Rowan’s gifts to Tarboro and Princeville, where George Terry’s church was devastated. He unloaded at Terry’s church, and the congregation dispersed it immediately to the houses that are being rebuilt.

“If anybody is suffering,” Don says, “they’re our people.”

And they’re grateful for what people in Rowan can do for people who need it.

“We can’t expect to place all the displaced persons in housing, find them jobs or rearrange the damage to the environment unless we do it one inch at a time,” Theresa wrote, telling Robin’s story in one of the “flood reports” she mailed to people who wanted them. “But ‘take the inch,’ have God bless it, and it will be like the loaves and fishes.”

And while they unloaded, somebody will no doubt remember what Vivian, that spunky little 81-year-old member of Don’s church, said when the waters went down.