Thirty Days Before the Storm:
How One Photograph Became a Testimony
A photograph captured before Hurricane Katrina became more than an image. It became a reminder to keep walking when the destination could not yet be seen.
Thirty days. That’s how much time stood between the moment Sheraton Walls raised his camera to capture a quiet, broken pier stretching into open water — and the moment Hurricane Katrina would change everything.
He didn’t know it then, but the photograph he took early in the morning on that foggy day would become far more than a picture. It would become a promise he’d cling to, a trust he’d carry out the door, and eventually, a testimony he’d share with anyone who needed to know that walking by faith and not by sight isn’t just a verse — it’s a way of surviving the unknown.
A year before Katrina, Sheraton and Gail had surrendered their lives to Jesus. What they didn’t know was how soon that surrender would be tested by the storm.
Katrina made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane, and a mandatory evacuation was declared for everyone living five to ten miles inland. It wasn’t an overreaction — the storm surge would go on to push six miles inland and twelve miles along the rivers and bays. The storm surge along the Mississippi Gulf Coast reached as high as 27.8 feet in Pass Christian — the highest ever recorded in U.S. history.
When the mandatory evacuation orders came, there was no time to save much of their belongings. They grabbed a change of clothes, their Bibles, and something to eat on the trip ahead to Tallahassee, FL.
Walk by Faith was one of the few things Sheraton and his wife Gail went back in to retrieve before they left. Somehow, even before the storm had a name people would never forget, that image of a pier — weathered, incomplete, disappearing into the horizon — had already become a picture of their own journey with God.
When Everything Else Was Left Behind
“The storm took everything — except what they carried with them.”
The kind of loss that doesn’t just cost you belongings, but shakes the ground you thought was solid under your life. And yet, in the middle of that loss, one thing remained: the photograph they’d chosen to save.
It wasn’t the pier in the image that carried them through what came next. It was what the image represented — a reminder that faith is a walk, not a single leap. That God’s faithfulness doesn’t depend on seeing the whole path. That provision comes step by step, along the way, toward a destination He has already predestined.
A Pier That Doesn’t Show You the End
There’s a reason that photograph resonated before the storm ever came. A pier like that doesn’t let you see where it ends. You can only see the next few steps in front of you — the boards beneath your feet, the water on either side, the horizon somewhere out past what your eyes can measure.
To walk out onto it takes trust. Trust that it will hold. Trust that it leads somewhere. Trust that you’re not walking out into nothing.
That’s what faith looks like. Not a full view of the destination, but a willingness to keep walking anyway — because the One who set the path is trustworthy, even when the path itself is unclear.
Sheraton couldn’t have known how literally he and Gail would live that image out in just thirty days.
The Long Way to Wilmington
The drive that should have taken a few hours took almost ten — 320 miles, bumper to bumper, alongside everyone else trying to outrun the same storm.
They stayed with family in Florida for a few days, then traveled on to Atlanta to stay with friends. Every step, it seemed, God had already planned.
With the roads into Mississippi closed and no way to return, the Lord spoke to Sheraton and told him to make it a vacation. So they did — leaving Georgia for Arkansas, staying with family there for a couple of days, then on to Cincinnati, Ohio, to stay with friends before finally making their way back to Mississippi.
Once home, they stayed with Gail’s mother for a few days. It was from there that they finally returned to the place they’d once lived — only to find there was almost nothing left to find.
A couple of floor tiles were the only proof that a home had ever stood there at all.
Standing on what used to be their foundation, Pastor Walls asked the Lord, “Where do you want us to go?”
And the Lord answered, “I will not tell you — but your wife Gail will.”
So Gail prayed and pulled out an atlas, tracing her finger across the map of the United States. One city seemed to rise off the page, as if it had been written in black marker:
Wilmington, North Carolina.
She told Sheraton what she’d seen, and together, they began their journey of walking by faith to Wilmington.
A Testimony, Not Just a Print
Today, Walk by Faith isn’t just a photograph hanging on a wall. For Sheraton and Gail Walls, it’s a testimony — a physical reminder of a season when they had every reason to fear but instead chose to trust.
It’s proof, hanging in a frame, that God provides for the need at every step of the journey, even when the destination isn’t yet visible.
That’s the story behind the image. Not just a broken pier captured a month before a hurricane — but a picture that walked out of harm’s way with them and became a testimony of God’s faithfulness on the other side of the storm.