Forget the analogies to freight trains and rocket liftoffs - to Lucille Stewart of Winter Garden, Fla., the burst of deadly tornadoes which crossed Florida Feb. 22-23 sounded like a screaming devil at her door.

"I was sitting there, listening to the wind," she said, "and all of a sudden the other side of that wall just went 'Whooooooooeeeeeee!'"

The tornado that hit Winter Garden shortly before midnight that Sunday ripped some roofing from her home and the 260-mile-per-hour winds blew out windows and punched small bits of debris through the walls. Mrs. Stewart says she got off easy.

Many of her neighbors weren't as lucky. Most houses in the manufactured-home community suffered worse damage; about half are uninhabitable and some were torn completely from their foundations, leaving behind a few shattered sticks littering a muddy rectangle of ground.

As the death toll from Florida's worst tornado catastrophe mounted to at least 39 people, with another 200 injured and three missing, help began pouring in from the Diocese of Central Florida and other church and social-service groups, as well as full-time relief agencies such as the Red Cross.

The Rt. Rev. John W. Howe, Bishop of Central Florida, immediately put in for a $25,000 emergency grant from the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief to help aid victims of the tornadoes. The grant was approved in full, and fund administrators sent application materials for additional money.

"I was talking with a nurse who had spent six months in Homestead after Hurricane Andrew, and she said that, in many ways, this is a worse disaster for the victims," Bishop Howe said. "We thank God that more people weren't injured or killed. Our hearts go out to all those affected. They are in our hearts and our prayers as we all work together to rebuild our community."

Miraculously, the diocese has determined so far that only one parishioner was directly affected.

Kim Mitchell, a member of Church of the Messiah in Winter Garden, was in her first-floor apartment in Winter Garden, with her son, Jason Gomola, 18, and her mother, Helen Mitchell, when the roof was torn off just before midnight Sunday.

"At first, with the lightning and all, it looked really cool," Ms. Mitchell said the day after the disaster. "Then the wind whipped up, and it got real quiet, and the next thing we heard was a loud roar.

"The pressure built up so much I thought my ears would pop," Ms. Mitchell said. "Then the windows shattered and it felt like the whole building was coming apart."

"Kim was wiped out of her apartment," said the Rev. Tom Rutherford, Messiah's rector.

The response from the congregation was swift: "We got together six pickup trucks and 18 people - old people, young people, some of them disabled but wanting to help," Fr. Rutherford said. "We had Kim moved out in one hour and completely moved into her new place in one hour. We were steppin' and fetchin'."

One group of young people, led by Dan Young, youth minister at Messiah, is getting some exercise out of their Bible lessons.

Mr. Young spent one Monday volunteering at the local emergency shelter set up at a high school. He stayed to help manage the arrival of students for their school day, and has been back several times. He soon recruited a small band of student volunteers to help Ms. Mitchell move.

"We had been reading James, chapter 2, about loving your neighbor and not showing favoritism, and I asked how many of them would want to put what we learned in the Bible into practice," he said.

Several in the group joined up, and their efforts have expanded to benefit others in need.

Tornadoes touched down in three different swaths in Winter Garden as well as spots in Volusia, Seminole and Osceola counties - all in the Diocese of Central Florida.

Fr. Rutherford's wife, Stoney, almost drove into one. "She missed it by three minutes," he said.

The Rt. Rev Hugo Pina-Lopez, assistant bishop for the diocese; the Rev. Canon Nelson Pinder, regional director for the Presiding Bishop's Fund; Ed Spalding, diocesan board member; and Fr. Rutherford toured the disaster areas two days later, assessing the damages in tornado-wracked neighborhoods such as Hyde Park.

"This is unbelievable, just terrible," Bishop Pina-Lopez said as he walked through the mud-caked, debris-scattered streets.

The group stopped along the way to offer condolences, prayer and encouragement to groups of city workers clearing trees and wires and homeowners trying to sort out their jumbled lives. A few homeowners were poking through the piles of sheet metal, wood, fiberglass insulation and tree limbs, trying to salvage their least-damaged belongings.

Nearby city governments are rallying around the devastated areas, offering municipal workers, police, fire trucks and construction equipment to help their neighbors dig out.

Scenes from the disaster are almost beyond belief:

• Cars, vans and trucks lie crushed like beer cans, lodged in roofs or burst into pieces too small to identify.
• Yellow fiberglass insulation hangs from trees like cotton candy.
• The rubble of an imploded house huddles 15 feet from an unblemished neighboring home and its potted plants hanging on the porch - not a leaf out of place.

The Ven. Linda Brondsted, archdeacon of the diocese, works in the emergency room at Orlando Regional Medical Center. After arriving home at about midnight Sunday from her shift at the hospital, she was called back in at 3 a.m. and stayed until mid-morning.

"There's just no way to imagine the devastation on people's lives, especially because most parts of Central Florida were absolutely untouched," she said. "It's bizarre to look out the window, a few hours later, and see the sun shining, the flowers in bloom, the birds singing."

Archdeacon Brondsted told of seeing one family of four that had huddled in their bathroom as the tornado approached.

"The mom held on to one little boy's shirt and said, 'Wherever you go, I'm going.' The dad was holding on to the 9-month-old son," she said. "Then everything started whirling around, and when it was over, the dad was found in the house next door, and the 9-month-old was gone."

The hospital and other area health facilities were blessed with an otherwise slow Sunday night, she said.

"On the previous nights, Friday and Saturday, there were eight-hour waiting times in the emergency room. On Sunday there were plenty of places available, thank God."

The archdeacon said the experience has brought home the need for a strong faith: "We've got to walk real, real close to Jesus, because there's no way we're going to get through this kind of thing without him."

"We need to work through the ecumenical groups and with the professional relief groups," Bishop Pina-Lopez said. "They have the experience with this kind of thing. They've been there before, with Hurricane Andrew and other disasters, so they already have the training and equipment needed here.

"The best thing we can do as a diocese is to say, 'Here we are, what can we do?'" Bishop Pina-Lopez said. "We will do anything to help."