MOULTRIE — When Saul of Tarsus was traveling to Damascus, God got his attention by striking him blind with a lightning bolt. When God wanted Sonny Bridges’ attention, he was a shade less dramatic, but it got the job done.

July 1994. Bridges left Moultrie July 4 to visit a friend at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. The voice on the radio was talking about flooding in western Georgia, but Bridges didn’t have to turn on his windshield wipers the whole trip up there. He stayed two days in Atlanta and never even had to cover his head to avoid raindrops.

On July 6 he started home. The radio man said South Georgia was inaccessible: “You can’t get there from here.”

Bridges didn’t believe it. Retired from the Department of Education as a consultant who designed bus routes, Bridges knew all the highways and all the backroads in 33 South Georgia school systems. When he encountered state troopers blocking I-75 in Macon, he simply turned off and took Pio Nono Avenue.

Until he encountered a creek where the road used to be.

No problem, he said. He turned around and tried another route. And found Department of Transportation barricades.

Again and again he tried different routes to get home, only to meet up with closed roads and overflowing waterways. He even tried to make it to Savannah so as to come down the coast.

Finally, he pulled to the side of the road.

“God called me right there to work for him,” Bridges recalled during an interview this week.

“I was too proud,” he said. “I ran my own life, but God humbled me: ‘Son, you can’t get home.’”

Bridges said he agreed to do whatever God wanted him to do. He got back on the road, and eventually came to a federal highway heading south. It took him a ways toward home, but then Bridges thought of a short cut. He turned off, met with another closed road, turned around and got back on the highway.

When he got home, Bridges told his wife, Ruth, what he’d experienced and what he’d decided.

“She said, ‘I’ll follow you anywhere God leads you, but I won’t go to Bangladesh.’”

The Bridges became involved in missions work, and their first assignment was not Bangladesh … but it was bad enough. Nicaragua, the largest country in Central America, is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti). Sonny Bridges remembered three Spanish phrases from classes 40 years before; Ruth Bridges didn’t speak the language at all.

“We went,” Sonny Bridges said, “[and] fell in love with mission work.”

Since then, the Bridges have made more than 35 mission trips outside the U.S. Most have been to Honduras, and the vast majority either there or elsewhere in Central America. They went to Thailand in response to the tsunami of December 2004. They went to St. Kitts, a small island in the Atlantic, to reroof buildings after a hurricane.

Their first two trips were as part of a group led by the Rev. Terrell Ruis, but after that Bridges formed his own team. Mostly they do construction work, especially for churches.

Under Bridges’ direction, volunteers from the United States and labor from the native congregation pour concrete floors, erect concrete-block walls and put a roof on, usually of metal. In the construction trade it’s called “drying it in.” After that, the volunteers’ work is done and the congregation does whatever it wants to the building, which usually includes plaster on the inside and out.

“Eventually they come out with a beautiful structure,” Bridges said.

There is a cost attached, but it’s not for labor.

“We don’t give them a church,” he said.

Bridges takes with him a contractor, who gives an estimate of the cost of materials. Volunteers pay their own way and donate toward the materials, but the congregation has to put a specified amount of money in too.

“You get in on the ground and you get to see what’s going on,” Bridges said. “What makes me so happy is I’m in the middle of it!”

He said the people are “so appreciative” of everything done for them because they have so little. He told of a child at the dedication of one of the churches he’d helped build. The little boy, about 8 years old, came in clutching a shoe box to his chest — a Christmas gift from the Samaritan’s Purse organization.

“That’s the only thing that child had that was his,” Bridges said.

Bridges said that during a presentation at a Colquitt County church, he heard someone ask, “Why are we wasting our money in these other countries when there are needs here in America?”

“I didn’t get mad,” Bridges recalled with some pride, “because I’m doing all I can do.”

Since 1994, Bridges has worked with Georgia Baptist Builders, a loose-knit group of men who build about a dozen churches a year. While no member goes to every site in a year, Bridges has worked on churches throughout the state.

For years, both he and Ruth have worked with Georgia Baptist Disaster Relief. They’ve made 12 trips to Bay St. Louis, Miss., as the Gulf Coast continues to recover from Hurricane Katrina. In fact, they were among the early relief teams heading to the region right after the disaster.

“We couldn’t even get to where they were going to send us,” Ruth Bridges recalled.

Both Ruth and Sonny are trained in mass feeding. During a recent trip to Bay St. Louis, Sonny Bridges fixed breakfast then went off to damage assessment duty while Ruth took over cooking lunch and supper.

They’ve also been to southern Florida in response to hurricanes.

The Bridges are also very involved with the Hispanic Baptist Church; Sonny drove a bus to field workers’ houses to bring them to services. During these trips, the workers asked about things they passed, but of course they were asking in Spanish. Bridges wanted to answer their questions, so he taught himself their language.

But locally, Bridges is best known for his wheelchair ramps.

Thursday morning, he and the youth of First Baptist Church completed the 170th such ramp since Bridges was called on to start the program in 2001. It initially operated under the auspices of Colquitt Regional Medical Center but has since become a project of First Baptist Church.

“My involvement is not just in Central America,” Bridges said. “It’s not just in Colquitt County. It’s wherever I’m called.”