Gracious Host
No one was a stranger to Harry "Hap" Hopkins, welcoming people at First United Methodist Church in Orlando, Fla. (Photo Courtesy of Florida Annual Conference)
Florida Annual Conference | October 14, 2024
There are certain people we meet in life who stay busy by being indispensable. Their hands are always reaching out to help someone and they are always there when work needs to be done.
No one is a stranger to them, and they have a knack for making someone else feel like the most important person in the world. They don’t seek the spotlight, and they don’t care about accolades. Your well-being is their reward.
When they leave us, what remains is an enormous hole that is felt in ways that are hard to describe.
Harry Hopkins was such a person.
Well, Harry is technically his given name but everyone called him Hap.
Hap died last week when he made contact with a downed power line while clearing debris from Hurricane Milton. He was 67 years old.
Hap was a long-time member of First United Methodist Church Orlando, and his passing left his community numb and hurting.
“People new to the church would tell me that he was the first person to greet them when they came and then to know them by name,” Lead Pastor Rev. Dr. Vance Rains said.
He and Hap connected when Rev. Dr. Rains was a youth director at the church in 1990 and then re-engaged when he came to First UMC as Lead Pastor in 2019. They shared a love of riding motorcycles; Hap owned a Harley that he liked to ride to church. He was in a Christian motorcycle club.
Seeking to serve
Harry "Hap" Hopkins was always looking for ways to serve, said his friends. (Photo Courtesy of Florida Conference)
He and Alice Williams, a former co-Lay Leader for The Florida Conference of The United Methodist Church, were classmates and friends at Evans High School in Orlando.
“He was genuine and easygoing, too,” she said. “There was no pretense with him, none, and that was part of the joy of being with him. He was a man of deep faith and lived it daily. He was the kind of laity person that the church and conference needs.
“He was always that way in high school, too. We were engaged in doing things that needed to be done. Hap was always involved in anything that we were doing that was service-oriented.”
That caring Christian presence
Hap started volunteering two years ago with the Conference Emergency Response Team, which kept him busy. Just the week before Hurricane Milton hit, he was with the team in Madison to assist with damage from Hurricane Helene.
“He was always that person who would say yes when you needed something. And he was asking, how can I help? Even if we didn't ask, he was reaching out, just wanting to know how he could help,” Florida Conference Disaster Relief Coordinator Trish Warren said.
“The thing with ERT is that caring Christian presence, and he truly was that caring Christian presence, listening to the survivors, working at their pace, and not just rushing in to get the job done. He wanted to work at their pace and not overwhelm them, which is just what you need when your whole life has been turned upside down.”
Often, the victims aren’t the only ones who need that caring Christian presence. Disaster scenes can be overwhelming for the volunteers and leaders, too. Hap understood that.
“He just had a calming presence. I don't even know that I have the words to describe it, but anytime I felt overwhelmed, he was that person who would just bring that peace," she said.
Trish cried when she heard the news of Hap’s accident, and she later shared his story on a conference call last week with response coordinators from around the country.
“Then we prayed for Hap’s family, and even though the other people didn’t know him, I don’t think there was a dry eye among them,” she said.
Outside of the formal disaster response work, Hap also did a lot of stuff on his own, too, such as helping neighbors put on roof tarps, clearing storm damage, or anything else they needed.
And then there is Amy, Hap’s wife of 30 years.
They were high school sweethearts but went in separate directions after graduation until, a few years later, they reconnected and married – which a lot of people who knew them said they always believed would happen.
“You rarely saw one without the other. They were always together,” Williams said.
“The word I would use to describe them is inseparable,” Rev. Dr. Rains said.
That included the Harley. Amy liked to ride, too.
Next year will mark 50 years since their high school graduation. Amy posted their picture on a Facebook page with information about the reunion.
“She talked about how much they were looking forward to the reunion,” Williams said.
I’ll be there for you
Maybe the best way to summarize Hap’s life is this story from Alice.
Several years after high school graduation, a friend in their group committed suicide.
“It was shocking to all of us. This guy was an attorney, successful attorney, you would have thought he had the world by the tail kind of thing,” she said.
Several of them gathered for his funeral and lingered afterward in some awkward small talk as no one really knew what else to say. That’s when Alice spoke up.
“I said, ‘All right, y'all, if any one of us ever feels that we are in a place where we were contemplating something like this, I said we're going to make a pinky pledge right now, that we're going to we're going to reach out to one another.' ”
When it was Hap’s turn to make the pledge, he went a step further.
“He held on for a minute, and he said, ‘Alice, I really mean this. If you ever need me, just let me know. I mean it.’ And he did mean it,” she said. “That's the kind of guy Hap was. I mean, by that time, our lives were different. But I swear to you that if I ever needed a 2 a.m. friend, he and Amy would have been persons I know I could have called.
“But the thing is, he would have done that for anybody. It’s always sad to hear people you know, have something tragic happen, but this … this was just one of those that you were like, no, not him, not him.”
Joe Henderson
Joe Henderson is News Content Editor for the Florida Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This article is republished with permission from the conference website.